大象传媒

From Rev鈥檇 Richard Coles, cleric and broadcaster:

For Faith in the World Week here on R2, we鈥檝e been exploring growing up in multi-faith Britain, but when I was growing up in the seventies in Kettering it was not a particularly multicultural experience. It was only when the Corby steelworkers down the road moved there en masse from Glasgow that the exotic note of square sausage was added to the general scene.

Multi faith was even rarer. This was an era when people lowered their voices to say 鈥楻oman Catholic鈥� and I remember a friend of mine from school, with a Jewish background, came to stay and my mum asked him, a bit too breezily, if he liked 鈥︹�� sausages and bacon and that sort of thing?鈥�

How different today, when you can buy in Kettering鈥檚 supermarkets Gujarati ghee, Polish pieroggi, Hungarian Hooka, and nine kinds of quinoa.

It鈥檚 not only how we eat that鈥檚 changed, its how we worship too. Minarets are as common as steeples in many British cities, in some places the turban is more often seen than the flat cap, and in Catholic churches from Cornwall to Cumbria you are just as likely to find a Mass in Polish as in English.

In time, most of us adapt to a changing world. 聽But what if that change runs ahead of people鈥檚 expectations, and the exotic note suddenly sounds too loud, too shrill? 聽

It would be daft to claim multi faith, multi cultural Britain is an unqualified triumph: daft too not to look at religion without wondering if it intensifies rather than calms fear and suspicion and hostility. We鈥檙e only a click or two away from barbarism in HD uploaded from Iraq to the Internet.

Maybe the cure for this sort of madness comes not from outside faith but from within? I would say that, wouldn鈥檛 I, flying the flag of the C of E limply from the sidelines. But all of us who follow in the tradition of Abraham - Christian, Jew and Muslim (in Mecca, or Jerusalem, or Dibley) - inherit the same fundamental truth: God made us all the same, granted to us all an irreducible, unerasable, non-negotiable dignity. Perhaps, if we practiced what we preached, and treated one another accordingly, we might begin to look less like the problem, and more like the answer.