| INTERFAITH activities have a limited effect on developing community cohesion, a two-year Government-funded study has shown. Researchers at Lancaster University investigated initiatives set up in the wake of racial unrest in the North-West in 2001. Interfaith activities were valuable, but engaged only a small minority, and were resisted by many from the Christian and Muslim communities, they found.
Interfaith activities should involve secular groups, say the report’s authors, Canon Dr Alan Billings, director of Lancaster’s Centre for Ethics and Religion, and Dr Andrew Holden. In towns with large ethnic minorities, regular contact between the groups contributes most to community cohesion, says the report. “The more that young adults have some sort of social interaction with those from other faith and ethnic communities, the more positive their attitudes towards them.”
They investigated attitudes among pupils at three community schools: one ethnically mixed, one overwhelmingly Asian, and one serving a white housing estate. Attitudes to race at the first two were generally liberal, but “white racist” views were common at the third school, where nearly one third of pupils expressed the view that their race was superior to others.
Dr Billings found that these attitudes reflected the “smouldering resentments” of the parents, and that: “The all-white school was unable by itself to overcome the entrenched white extremism that mediated itself through the family, the peer group, and the enclave.” The “mixed school” should itself be seen as a form of interfaith activity in ameliorating illiberal attitudes among some young white people, while teaching young Muslim Asians how to deal with prejudice.
The researchers also have a message for Muslim clerics and leaders: “There is an urgent need for the Muslim community to develop theological expressions of how to be both British and Muslim that is at least as comprehensive and coherent as the ideology of the Islamic extremists. This is a challenge not only for imams and others who exercise leadership at the local level, but also for universities, colleges and teacher training institutions.” |
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