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Dreams should be sustaining, says Williams
By Bill Bowder
The Church Times
11/27/2004
THE ARCHBISHOP of Canterbury shares the Prince of Wales’s concern that young people should be encouraged to have realistic expectations of their lives.
It was one of the points he made when giving the Hinton lecture on "Building Moral Communities" on Wednesday of last week.
Dr Williams said that "a lot of rhetoric" aimed at young people suggested that everyone could achieve their goals and make the differences that they wanted to make. "Very often, I’d feel less uneasy if people, not least the young, were urged to commit themselves not to the possibility of achieving a dream, but to having the kind of vision (dream if you must) that sustains you even when it is hard to realise."
In the same lecture, Dr Williams responded to fears that faith-based groups’ activity in the voluntary sector is a "Trojan horse"; and he called on statutory bodies that were suspicious of faith-based initiatives to reconsider their position. "I don’t think that a voluntary sector with strong faith representation is necessarily a tool of fundamentalist repression. Instead, government departments should negotiate with them," Dr Williams said.
Everyone was "rightly sensitive" to the risks of provoking inter-community tensions. "But many are equally afraid of an interfaith coalition pushing a socially conservative agenda (on abortion or sexuality or gender roles) in a way that is dangerous to what may be a numerically stronger but more weakly motivated proportion of the population."
The answer was "mechanisms of brokerage", and "processes that identify specific needs and skills and how to match them, and to clarify what is and isn’t achievable by partnership," Dr Williams said.
"Our best strategy is engagement, drawing people and groups into a position where they genuinely feel they have a stake in co-operation, consultation and negotiation, rather than trying to pretend that the contribution of communities of belief to the public good can be ignored."
He appealed to "some statutory bodies" to "look again at their practice as regards concrete support for faith-based voluntary initiatives. I have seen too many carefully structured and non-manipulative programmes, for children’s welfare in particular, treated as inadmissible for public/statutory support because of a ‘faith’ basis."
Isolating religious groups and refusing to harness their motivation was a recipe for resentment and rivalry, and could foster extremism.
Dr Williams also spoke of "deep anxieties" about the Government’s gambling legislation. "If public authority is seen to collude with exploitative and addictive patterns of behaviour, and to be shaping policy not for communal good, but for the interests of powerful financial concerns, a message is bound to be heard, intended or not. We can’t assume that it will not impact upon local and family life."
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