Article

Comment

Freedom of Belief

26 June 2023

7 min read

The right to believe – or not: how's the UK doing?

As the UN passes its first ever resolution on freedom of religion, Philip Mounstephen, author of the UK Government review, appraises progress on the issue.

Philip Mounstephen

Philip Mounstephen is Bishop of Truro and Founding Chair of the UK Freedom of Religion or Belief Forum.

A person stands in the burn out shell of a church in Nigeria.

The shell of a burned out Nigerian church.

Open Doors.

I had an unusual start to my Christmas in 2018 when I was rung up by the Archbishop of Canterbury to ask me if I’d be willing to lead a review of the way the Foreign Office had addressed - or otherwise - the persecution of Christians. It became clear that this was a request from the then Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, who was very moved by the issue and clearly concerned both about the human stories of Christians caught up in persecution, and worried that his department just wasn’t doing enough about it.

Six hectic months later, almost exactly four years ago, my review was published and the Government (and not just the Foreign Office) accepted my recommendations in full. So how has the UK got on with their implementation?

Before I address that, however, let me deal with two key aspects of my findings and recommendations which are vital for getting inside this issue.

First, I argued that the most effective way to address the persecution of Christians is to guarantee freedom of religion of belief for all – and that includes the right not to believe - and my recommendations were all framed around that conviction. To argue for special pleading for one group over another would be deeply un-Christian. It would also, ironically, expose that group to greater risk, by isolating them and unintentionally portraying them as agents of the West. We must seek freedom of religion of belief for all, without fear or favour.

Second, we need to understand why this is a such a serious issue in today’s world.

If you lift the stone of persecution and look underneath, what is it that you find? You find authoritarian, totalitarian regimes that are intolerant both of dissent and of minorities; you find aggressive militant nationalism that insists on uniformity; you find religious zealotry and fundamentalism in many different forms that often manifests itself in violence; and in contexts where governments are weak you find gang welfare on an industrial scale driven by drug crime. And you often find those phenomena combined too. In other words, we find massive threats to human flourishing and harmonious communities and ultimately we find in those things significant threats to our own security as well. We can no longer say that this is a sidebar issue of a special interest group. These are huge issues that we face in the world today.

And, the global situation as regards freedom of religion or belief is getting steadily worse, not better, not least in the world’s two most populous countries, China and India. It has certainly worsened significantly since my Review reported. It’s for that reason that the last of my recommendations was that implementation of them all should be independently reviewed three years on from their acceptance. That piece of work was published last summer, just before the UK hosted a major International Ministerial Conference on this issue.

So what did the reviewers conclude? To quote their report:

There has been a positive overall response to the Recommendations, with active steps being taken towards implementing an overwhelming majority of them. However, some of those steps have been taken relatively recently.

I think we can unpack that statement a little. What does ‘There has been a positive overall response to the Recommendations, with active steps being taken towards implementing an overwhelming majority of them’ mean? It means what it says, but it also means that a number of recommendations are in the process of being implemented, but have not yet been completed. And of course it also means that some recommendations remain to be implemented. And what does ‘some of those steps have been taken relatively recently’ mean? Well, it might imply that there was a certain rush of action in the light of the review team’s work being undertaken – all of which underlines the wisdom of including that final recommendation in the first place.

Also of note is the response that the then Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, made to the reviewers’ work:

We welcome and accept this expert review on progress and in line with the findings, accept their assessment for the need to continue to work to promote and strengthen Freedom of Religion or Belief as a fundamental human right for all…

The independent assessment concludes that the majority of the recommendations are either at an advanced stage of delivery or in the process of being delivered, whilst noting that there is still more to do.

Those skilled at reading statements such as this will point out to you the significance of the Foreign Secretary not just welcoming but accepting the findings. And note too the force of that phrase whilst noting that there is still more to do.

And, as I said, that assessment of progress was published just before the UK hosted the International Ministerial Conference last year. And a great event it was. Through it the UK put down a significant marker as to the significance it attaches to this issue. And we have also taken a leading role in the recently established inter-governmental International Religious Freedom of Belief Alliance, with Fiona Bruce MP, Prime Minister’s Special Envoy for Freedom of Religion or Belief currently holding the chair. I take no personal credit for this, but I doubt that either the UK would have hosted the Conference or that Mrs Bruce would have chaired the Alliance had not Jeremy Hunt launched the review – a review which earned him very few political ‘brownie points’ – four and a half years ago.

And yet not all in the garden is rosy. There has been a marked reluctance in some parts of the Foreign Office to recognise the religious dimension in some contexts.

Consider the approach that had been taken to the Middle Belt of Nigeria and the phenomenon of the conflict associated with the Fulani herdsmen. The standard Foreign Office line has been that this is an old conflict between contrasting lifestyles exacerbated by climate change. In other words, the religious dimension is significantly underplayed. A year or so ago the then relevant government minister claimed in a letter to be ‘unaware of substantiated evidence that extremist Islamist ideology is a driver of intercommunal attacks’. I’m afraid that is so completely at odds with the evidence, including that cited in my Review, as to be literally incredible. And, of course, if the Foreign Office claims there is no religious component to the violence they will fail to come up with religiously literate responses to it.

Happily, however more recent statements, in a clear change of tack, have begun to recognise the religious dimension to this unfolding tragedy.

Or take the recent violence in the Indian state of Manipur, with hundreds of churches targeted and destroyed, several killed and thousands displaced. Foreign Office replies to Parliamentary questions about it have been anodyne in the extreme. They remind me of the egregious attitude of the East India Company 250 years ago which protected trade at any price, even in the face of human rights abuses they could otherwise have addressed. Plus ça change.

However even as this article was being written there’s been a further and very significant positive development. Recommendation 20 of my Review called for the UK to sponsor a UN Security Council resolution on this issue. The panel of experts who reviewed implementation last year were not optimistic that it could be achieved. However, on 14 June 2023 the Security Council adopted resolution 2686, a UK-UAE joint resolution on tolerance and religious freedom. Its text addresses growing concern at hate speech and incitement to violence, and calls for action on the persecution of religious and other minorities in conflict. This is the first ever Security Council resolution on this issue, putting it firmly on the international geopolitical table.

In the UK, as elsewhere, we need to recognise that a commitment to freedom of religion or belief is not a ‘nice to have’ in today’s world, additional to the hard world of realpolitik. Not at all it. It touches upon and highlights some key issues in today’s world such as the rise of fundamentalist, nationalistic and authoritarian regimes of all kinds the world over whose treatment of vulnerable minorities is often not short of appalling and whose actions threaten not only the lives and livelihoods of those minorities but also threaten to destabilise international order, increase insecurity, (including food insecurity, as we have seen in this last year) and make it all the harder to address big ticket global issues such as climate change.

Indeed I believe that the wholesale denial of freedom of religion or belief is just one such a big ticket item and I hope and pray we remain sensitised to this issue and appreciate the vital importance of all of us, governments, churches, other faith groups, civil society, and individuals, addressing it with the seriousness and urgency which it undoubtedly requires.

Article

Biology

Comment

Wildness

10 July 2025

5 min read

There’s a sting in the tail if we construct lessons from nature

Don’t be like the bees

Julia Kendal

Juila is a writer and social justice advocate.

A bee keeper hold honeycomb to the light

HiveBoxx on Unsplash.

‘Be like the bees’ we hear not infrequently. These furry hive dwellers have been coopted by many, from socialists to capitalists, to put a point across. One party draws on their social structure as an inspiration, another their worker bee ethic. They are indeed an example to us. And yet at the same time, bee communities do things that we would find reprehensible in fellow humans. Male bees are expelled from the hive when they are no longer considered reproductively useful. The bees we see out and about this summer are often the oldest, sent to do the dangerous foraging work because they are considered the most expendable. This was a jarring discovery for me, reading it in Katherine May’s timely book, Wintering, during the first COVID-19 lockdown. I was one of the millions shielding and being protected by the ways that society shifted to serve the most vulnerable to the virus; bees, I had just learned, would not behave like this. There are some limits, it seems, to the lessons we construct from nature.

For we do love to construct them. Spend a moment on LinkedIn or Substack, and there are a multitude of articles drawing lessons from the world around us and the creatures we share it with.

This impulse is not new; throughout history, people and communities have done this. People’s relationship with nature is not static or homogenous. The wilderness has been variously a place of fear to be avoided, of growing wonder as described by the Romantic Poets, a site of knowledge neglected by those in power but maintained by others, often women and indigenous communities.

What strikes me about the current trend is that it seems to push to an extreme of unquestioning veneration: nature is perfect and our whole teacher. There are posts about perfect harmony we should emulate, or a call to copy an endless adaptability. These are the things that we might long for – but do not seem to be borne out in ecosystems where sea urchins demolish kelp forests, and the climate crisis reveals the limits of species to adjust. We are being called to see what we want (or feel we need) rather than what actually exists in the world around us.

This instinct to carve lessons from creation extends beyond the natural world to the work of human hands. The Japanese art of kintsugi, repairing broken pottery with gold, has become increasingly prevalent as a metaphor for healing; a beautiful idea but one that risks being stripped of its culture, and that has both limitations and dangers. In Sarah Perry’s novel, The Essex Serpent, Cora’s husband Michael masks his abuse by speaking in a romantic metaphor of his intention to break her down and mend her with gold, like the Japanese art in their hallway. But Cora is not a vase; she is woman. Michael’s breaking harms her. She only begins to repair after he is gone; it is messy, some parts seem irrevocably changed. I think of my own losses, and how healing is indeed available, but rarely as straightforward as putting the same pieces back together. To think it is so can hinder our restoration, and miss out on the transformation that may be possible. As the journalist Poorna Bell wrote after her husband’s death by suicide: “I was in some ways sadder, wiser, but also my existence was much bigger, more honest.”

We have a great capacity to learn – and we need it to survive. As writer Andy Crouch put it in his book, Culture Making: “a human baby is the strangest and most wonderful creature this world can offer. No other mammal emerges so helpless from the womb, utterly unable to cope with the opportunity and adversity of nature. Yet no other creature holds such limitless possibility… We are hard-wired for nothing but learning. All we begin with are possibilities.”

This ability to grow and understand and change is essential if we are to navigate the world. And in our encounters with this place, with brokenness and confusion, the instinct to make meaning, to tidy, to be able to point to something and say 'this is how we should be’ is a form of comfort. Maybe even control it. We are grappling with not just how to understand the world, but how to be in it.

If we are always looking for the lesson, we devalue nature by prizing it just for what it can give us.

Creation and creativity have much to teach us – they’re a testament to and the fruit of the imagination of God. But to prize them just for their lessons seems to fall into another form of extraction and to miss out on something else, something that may be a greater gift in this messy world: wonder.

Bees moving from flower to flower are not setting out on their mission with a side hustle of education for the human race. They are being their full bee selves. Nectar is necessary; this is how it is collected. Bees share knowledge about the good plants via a ‘waggle dance’. This is how the colony persists. It is not for my benefit (though it may encourage me to a moment of playfulness).

Writing this on my balcony, I pause when I see dozens of birds circling one thermal; a moving column of gulls and red kites that goes up and up and up. I could strive for a teachable moment (maybe something about co-existence?) but it feels not just unnecessary, but an interruption. In that moment, I was a human being in awe of birds riding the warm air; that feels like something full of beauty in itself. I worry that if we are always looking for the lesson, we devalue nature by prizing it just for what it can give us. And we miss out on the opportunities to marvel at creation itself.

And, in calling each other to be like other creatures, we accidentally dehumanise other people and ourselves. In the face of conflict, polarisation and disconnection, to contend for each other’s humanity feels vital. And to recognise our own humanness is to acknowledge our limitations. There are parts of nature currently beyond our comprehension. Birdsong holds complexity heard by the intended audience but we can only guess at its meaning. There is something to accepting the edges of our own understanding. Sometimes we touch on truths that seem to contradict or be in tension. Perhaps they are layers that we cannot intellectually fit together but that build up a fuller, richer story that resonates in our souls. Glimpsing something of the multifaceted wisdom and wonder of God himself – and that helps us to remember who we are. A particular type of creature: a human.

So, I won’t be a bee. I’ll keep trying to learn to be what I am: a particular human in a bigger community, world and story. Now, I’m off to admire the goldfinches, glinting in the sunshine.

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