Sentamu admitted he sometimes stared at people and wondered if it was they who were "writing these terrible, terrible letters". Then he smiled and added: "But I wake up every morning and I am breathing and I say, 'It's a good day; it's going to be okay'."

He also revealed he had previously been the victim of racist threats while sitting on the inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager. He was sent a photograph of the murdered boy. "Under it were the words, 'You are next'," said Sentamu. "It was written in red ink."

The inquiry investigated the failure of the "institutionally racist" police to bring Lawrence's murderers to justice. Sentamu passed the photograph and some of the more lurid letters to the police, but nobody is thought to have been charged.

In 2002 such "virulent threats" turned to violence when he was attacked on his way home from a celebration at St Paul's Cathedral to mark the Queen's golden jubilee.

"A young man spat on me and said 'nigger go back'," Sentamu recalled. "He then pushed me down an escalator. I had to go to hospital. I had just finished singing hymns and he realised where I had come from."

In the first set-piece interview since he was confirmed as archbishop last week, Sentamu displayed a willingness to speak openly and challenge conventional views. He accused the British of godlessness, defended Muslim schools and did not shy away from diving into the politics of Iraq.

Despite his experiences with hate mail Sentamu, a former judge who fled to Britain 25 years ago to escape persecution from Idi Amin, then Uganda's dictator, believes British society is essentially tolerant. "The United Kingdom compared to the rest of Europe is trying desperately hard to be a loving, inclusive society," he said. "I feel at home.

"The English person in the main has a sense of what it is to be a citizen, to belong and to be welcoming to strangers." But he warned that growing disregard for church and God risked alienating people of other faiths, especially Muslims.

"For the first time in human history Europe has suggested that it is possible to live without the concept of God," he said. "Muslims find that hard to understand. Islam may be posing questions we need to hear, and sometimes it is us who need to understand those asking the questions."

Despite his importance in the Church of England, the archbishop declared he is happy for Muslims to attend Anglican schools. More controversially he said it was acceptable for pupils to be educated in Muslim schools even where the intake is predominantly Christian.

His remarks are likely to infuriate Christians and secularists alike. "You may find today that a Muslim school is predominantly Muslim," said Sentamu. "Who knows, the Muslims may move out and before you know where you are more Christians have come into it. The question is: should that school be taken over by Christians?

"If it continues to deliver good all-round education why should someone want to say 'hand it over'? It is not a question of who is in charge but what it delivers."

When asked if he is troubled that Muslim schools might not treat girls equally, he replied: "Muslim schools I know of are very well run. They invite me to talk about God because under the national curriculum religious education classes must include the teaching of comparative religion. So you have fantastic dialogue. In the long run I want to say to people, 'Could we be slightly more relaxed?' "

His father was a priest in a remote village and his family of 13 children was very poor. When Sentamu was born he weighed just 4lb and his mother feared he would not survive.

For all his modest background he is not embarrassed by the grandeur of his new post. The archbishop's medieval Bishopthorpe Palace will undergo a three-year renovation before he moves in. Asked if such good living would alienate the church further from its flock, he replied: "When the Lord had his last supper he had it in the best room. Our God is a great creator who actually longs for people not to live in squalor.

"Those who think walking around in sandals takes them close to Jesus, well it doesn't. The heart of the gospel is not where I live but what I do with it."

He promises to make the young welcome at the palace, and his style is likely to contrast with that of his predecessor, David Hope, who could be seen pushing a trolley round the local Tesco at 5.30am.

Short, smiley and outgoing, Sentamu could grow into the public face of the Church of England. He looks two decades younger than his 56 years, with a passing resemblance to Gladstone Small, the former England fast bowler.

There was opposition to him on the appointments commission as some saw him as a Blairite crowbarred into the job by No 10. "I had to put a very blunt question [to Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury] as to whether Downing Street had a hand in this," he admitted. "I was assured it didn't."

But he is not afraid to make his political feelings plain. When asked if Blair is good for Britain, he said: "Certainly on social inclusion, the need to improve our health services, the need to get the schools running again, the agenda that there isn't a conflict between money and a caring community, I think he and Gordon Brown have been good for Britain."

However, he did oppose the war in Iraq and disclosed he wrote to Blair begging him not to invade. "I urged him, 'If you really want to disarm Saddam Hussein you need weapons inspectors there much longer'. I am surprised he believed that dodgy intelligence. I also wrote to George Bush, but I never had a reply."

His pragmatism is clear in his present views on Iraq and the cold comfort he now offers to anti-war protesters. After eulogising British soldiers, whom he called "the best in the world", he said: "The most important thing is not to give a voice that says we are divided.

"The people who say 'get the armies out' have not understood this would be the worst thing to do. We have to make sure the Iraqi government can provide order."

Sentamu could become a bridge to conservative African churches breaking away from the Church of England over gay priests. He drew a parallel between celibate homosexuals - who could be tolerated - and heterosexuals who might lust after women but did not commit adultery. "Jesus said anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has committed adultery in his heart; that is the standard," he said.

"That doesn't mean any man who looks at a woman and says 'Wow, she looks good' is going to be debarred from the kingdom of God."

He supports women bishops ("I love ordaining women") and indicated he finds a solution attributed to the Archbishop of Canterbury - whereby Williams would avoid ordaining women bishops by asking other bishops to stand in for him - too clever by half. But in the next breath he declared he would agree not to ordain women bishops if that is what the church wanted.

"I would rather be in a church that is quite fuzzy sometimes, but the core message is Christ," he said. He refused to accept that the church faces inexorable decline, but he is frustrated by faithlessness.

"St Bede said it was the gospels that gave nationhood to England," he said. "The English were people fighting among themselves and it was the Christian church that civilised this nation.

"And now this civilisation has come, people don't want to worry about the roots of that civilisation."

Additional reporting: Alex Delmar-Morgan