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Makin and trust in the Church among issues raised in social-cohesion debate

09 December 2024

Bishops also speak of equality and interfaith relations during Lords debate

Parliament TV

The Archbishop of York addresses the House of Lords on Friday

SOCIAL cohesion would not be achieved without equitable access to housing, education, and health care, the Archbishop of York told the House of Lords on Friday.

He was moving a debate granted to the Archbishop of Canterbury, on the importance of social cohesion and strong supportive community life during periods of change and global uncertainty. It followed the rioting (News, 9 August) in response to the murders of three children, Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe, and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, in Southport, on 29 July (News, 2 August).

Those riots had been fuelled by “hideous extremist rhetoric, which came from mysterious places online”, the Archbishop said. But the uncomfortable truth had to be faced: many of the people involved had not been extremist.

More than half of those charged with violence and disorder had come from the country’s most deprived 20 per cent of neighbourhoods: “Those with the worst health outcomes, lowest levels of qualifications, lowest employment, and where the impact of austerity, the pandemic, a cost-of-living crisis, and rising inflation have hit hardest, intensifying those feelings of being left behind.

“That was made all the worse by social media’s wildfire of disinformation, and has been fed by years of hard and soft extremist rhetoric.”

That rise of misinformation was undermining trust in democracy itself, and in the rule of law, Archbishop Cottrell said, describing as a “tragedy” the findings of a diversity study that had revealed that one in ten people in England and Wales did not know anyone well enough in their local area to ask them a favour.

“The loss of what is sometimes called ‘the economy of favours’ is one we should all feel deeply: a culture where we look out for one another not because we are told to, but because it would never occur to us to do differently,” he said. “Values are best protected and communicated by beliefs, customs, rituals, and practices: the very things that are the lifeblood of faith communities.”

The particular genius of the parish church and the parish system, he said, was that it preserved and communicated meaning, value, and belonging in places where people could serve and be served. A Theos report had found that parish churches had been central to the emergency response to the riots, but the Archbishop emphasised that the fruit of their relational work was also seen in other faith communities: “With others, the Church of England must continue to build and nurture these connections,” he said.

The Bishop of London, the Rt Revd Sarah Mullally, described the riots as “a wake-up call to us all to prioritise community cohesion”. The pandemic had been a world-changing event that had had a different impact on everyone, and had evoked horror at the high death rate. “We know that those from ethnic communities were more likely to have caught Covid, to have been hospitalised, and to have died from it,” she said.

“According to OS data, the Bangladeshi population faced a death rate five times higher than the white British population; the Pakistani population was three times higher. . . We knew that there were unequal health outcomes before Covid, but in some ways Covid demonstrated the scale of them.”

There had been lessons to be learned from the ingenuity of faith communities in building trust out of a crisis, Bishop Mullally said. “Working for the good of a place that you live in and seeing a difference is one of the most important and fulfilling parts of our citizenship. We tend to have a greater appreciation and support for something we’ve helped to build, and it is good to see this.”

The Bishop of Bristol, the Rt Revd Vivienne Faull, said that, in the 1980s, it had been John Savage, “a business leader and entrepreneur formed by Anglicanism’s bridge-building tradition”, who had led the Bristol initiative to build common ground between the “estranged tribes” of the city.

“This articulated intention was to create a city which, by 2050, would be a just, sustainable, healthy, and hopeful environment in which all of us could live. That is the underpinning of Bristol’s ‘one-city’ commitment drawing together public, private, voluntary, creative, and community organisations.”

Her own diocese, the parishes, and the cathedral were playing their parts, she said. One example was St Mary Redcliffe, “for a while the preserve of the Bristol elite”, which had “re-embedded itself in its local and often marginalised community, particularly welcoming refugees”.

All this, she said, “buttressed the bonds of peace”. She looked for some reassurance that the Government would respond to the enterprising work that was being done in cities such as Bristol to build those bonds, and to “renew the justice in our divided city.”

Social cohesion acted as a bridge between richly diverse communities in which people of different cultures, beliefs and faiths lived alongside one another, the Bishop of Lichfield, Dr Michael Ipgrave, said. “It enables us to live well together, providing resilience to communities when faced with adversity and enabling us to coexist peacefully.

“But, as demonstrated by the riots this summer, this kind of social cohesion can no longer be taken for granted. The consequences of growing division should not be underestimated, and we must not ignore the increasing threat of erosion that the social cohesion binding us together faces.”

He spoke of “a major spike” in anti-Semitic hate crime in the UK after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks on 7 October 2023, and the simultaneously increasing threats to social cohesion in many of the communities where Muslims lived.

“While national and international events can act as triggers for social unrest, I believe that these incidents are not isolated events, but reflect insidious tensions that had been building long before the events themselves took place,” he said. “It is therefore necessary that our approach to building social cohesion should be preventive and long-term.”

A long and strong history of interfaith work in Woolwich, where he had served as Bishop, had been one reason that predicted widespread rioting and unrest after the brutal murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby (News, 31 May 2013) had not materialised, he said. It had “woven a texture of local community that was too tight-knit for any butcher’s knife to tear apart”.

Lord Singh congratulated the Archbishop on calling an important debate. “The challenge before us is to recognise and discard irrational prejudice,” he said. “Religion was meant to make us better human beings, but much of the conflict in the world today is between different religions or subsets of religions, each claiming a superiority of belief and a unique access to the one God of us all.”

 

THE debate ran to four-and-a-half-hours. A few of the speakers, most notably Baroness Berridge, a PCC member, took the opportunity to express unhappiness with the Church of England. Since Standing Orders did not permit questions to be asked of it, “In the absence of an independent structure, to whom should we send our concerns?” she asked.

She wanted to “fire a series of questions at the Minister” about standards of principles, what an independent review constituted, and who could be an independent chair. “A proper inquiry or review heals wounds and brings cohesion if it engages victims properly,” she said, referring to Bishop James Jones’s chairing of the Hillsborough review on a non-statutory basis as proof that it was possible (News, 1 February 2022).

Parliament TVThe Bishop of London addresses the House of Lords on Friday

The nation needed “a swift, independent, probably judge-led redress for these victims and any other historical cases or reviews to be dealt with” before a new Archbishop of Canterbury took office, or there was a royal occasion to host, she said. The Lords also needed to know whether the Bishop of Newcastle, Dr Helen-Ann Hartley, was “the Church of England’s equivalent of Alan Bates to the Post Office”.

Archbishop Cottrell concluded his own speech on what he called “a sobering note, in view of all that has been happening in the Church of England in recent weeks. Unless institutions are safe places for children, families, and vulnerable adults, the things that we all long for and believe in will not come to pass.”

The Makin review had “revealed shocking failures within the Church of England to safeguard children and, in this case, vulnerable young adults”, he said.

“I pay tribute to the victims and survivors who came forward to discuss the horrors that they experienced. My heart goes out to them, and I apologise for these shameful failings. Moreover, I pledge myself to work purposely for independent scrutiny of safeguarding in the Church of England and greater operational independence. These are the next steps that we must take, and we have much to learn from others.”

Bishop Mullally also issued an apology, at the start of a speech in which her declared focus was to be on trust and partnership. “First, on trust, we have much to do to improve trust within the Church of England,” she said.

“Not least, we must ensure we have a greater survivor focus, and introduce independent safeguarding and mandatory reporting. I join my friend, the Most Revd Primate, in apologising for the shocking failures that the Makin report highlighted.”

Dr Ipgrave, who spoke immediately after Lady Berridge, said that he “took to heart” her “searching and challenging words”, and thanked her for them. “We recognise the urgency and centrality of independent scrutiny in the life of our Church,” he said.

Read more on this story in this week’s Leader comment.

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