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

Assisted dying

Comment

Mental Health

2 December 2024

6 min read

No, it is not your life to dispose of

What could not be said about the assisted dying debate

Steve Hellyer

Steve is the former vicar of St Matthew's Oxford.

Empty bus seats are lit in dark neon colours.

Vy Tran on Unsplash.

It is 1979. I am aged 23 and have been in great mental and emotional anguish and pain for years. I am on a pointless journey, on Greyhound busses, from the East coast of America to the West, and am presently sitting in a parked bus just outside a city in Arizona; the powerful engine idles as we wait for departure time, giving a gentle to-and-fro rocking motion to the bus. I have not eaten for days, am unspeakably tired of my life, and have made a written list of possible ways to end it.

But not on that list is one possibility I have not previously considered, but which is now before me. As I look out to my right, up into the Arizona desert hills, I realise that here is an option which perfectly fits with my desire, not so much to do away violently with myself, as simply to drift into a passive oblivion; I realise that I could simply rise from my seat right now, get off the bus, stumble off into the desert hills, lie down, and wait to die. I need not shoot or poison myself after all. I know I can do this, and fairly easily; to die will take time, but no matter. No-one knows where I am, no-one will know I am missing, no-one will come looking for me, and probably no-one will find me. It is suddenly an immensely attractive prospect, and I am seconds away from rising up from my seat...

There is one thing, one thing only, that makes me hesitate; it is what other people would call ‘a religious belief’, but to me it is simply a truth.

It is this; I am absolutely sure that there is a God. And suddenly there is something grimly, darkly humorous even, in what I thus believe will follow my death; I will find myself, not in peaceful oblivion, but in the presence of God. I will, as they say, ‘meet my Maker’. And what then will I say to God? I will say: “Apologies: I could not go on, there was no other way out for me”. But what, I reason, if God were then to say: “You are wrong. There was a way forward. Look: you could have stayed on the bus, and had you done so, let me show you how your earthly future would have panned out…” And I will listen, and I will watch, as the film rolls on, showing me an alternative future. But of course, by then it would be too late…

And suddenly, sitting on that bus, in a moment of cold clarity, I realise, with a kind of desolate logic, how I am caught. In a very real sense, my belief in God my Creator means that I am not in fact ‘free’ to dispose of myself; more, that what I refer to so glibly as ‘myself’ is not in fact MY self. The bus ticket in my pocket may be ‘my’ ticket, my rucksack ‘my’ rucksack, but my life is not after all my possession, mine to dispose of; it is a loan, a gift, from a Giver, to Whom I am responsible, answerable…

I remain in my seat. The bus continues its gentle rocking motion a while longer. The driver gives his familiar 1970s Greyhound driver’s recitation, the various admonitions and prohibitions I have heard so many times as I have crossed America, I could give the speech myself (ending with the words ‘and no marijuana’, which always raises a smile) – and the bus pulls out onto the freeway. I look back over my shoulder at the desert hills as they recede, and feel I am leaving more than the desert hills behind; I am still in deep pain, but know I have left a possibility behind me, for good. Months later I will reflect on this moment and realise with a smile that the name of the city where I had put death behind me by not rising was Phoenix.

And so my journey has continued – on, in due time, to a return to England, to a measure of healing, to getting ordained as an Anglican priest, to thirty-four years of Church ministry, to marriage to a very remarkable woman, to fatherhood of two children - and, at some future moment, to my own death: all in God’s time.

How shoddy, shrunken and lonely, is our much vaunted and trumpeted vision of the autonomous individual.

The word ‘God’ was probably used very little, if at all, in the MPs debate on assisted suicide - and this debate has really been about assisted suicide, not ‘assisted dying’, given that people will be given drugs to self-administer. Even the Christian MPs who spoke, did not mention God, as they knew what could be said, and what could not, in order for them to be heard at all. The public arguments for, and against, the legalisation of assisted suicide have almost without exception had to be premised on one agreed assumption, apparently the only one now permissible in a post-Christian, liberal humanist, agnostic/atheist society: the assumption that my life is mine. The arguments used for assisted suicide resolve down to: “It is my life: I should be allowed to decide when to end it”. Most of the arguments used against resolve down to: “Yes, of course, granted, agreed, it is your life: but there may be unintended consequences for others in allowing you to end it, others may feel obliged to end their lives”, etc. At no point could anyone say, as I so passionately would claim: “No, it is not your life to dispose of”; there is now, it seems, no public place for the apostle Paul’s blunt statement in his letter to the Church in Corinth: ‘You are not your own.’

Yet this is now one of the most fundamental beliefs of ‘my’ life: and I have found it to be totally liberating and beautiful. I think of those glorious sculptures on the outer walls of Chartres Cathedral, including the representation of the creation of Adam, presented as emerging from the very mind of God. I think of the glory of man and woman made in God’s image as stewards of creation. I think of the extraordinary wonder of the Incarnation, of God embodied in Christ. I think of the sufferings of Christ on the cross; and I think, yes, of course I think, of the sufferings of my fellow men and women and children, and of my own sufferings, and of the call to me to shoulder the burden, both of living, and of dying, in God’s time.

And, alas, I think I also see something of how shrivelled, how wizened in comparison, how shoddy, shrunken and lonely, is our much vaunted and trumpeted vision of the autonomous individual – “my life, my rights, my body, my choice” - in the dominant contemporary Western mindset, eating away steadily like a corrosive acid any wider conception of community and the social institutions that enshrine it, and any sense of a deeper accountability to God.

Where will the current assisted suicide decision ultimately lead? What is the destination? It is difficult to predict, but the signs from other countries who have gone down this road are not good.

But what do I know? Do I have answers to all the questions around assisted suicide? I confess I do not. But one thing has become clearer to me: I am on a very different journey from the one my nation is travelling now.