In two long conversations with Blair recently, I explored his conviction that religion matters-that it shapes what people believe and how they behave, that it is vital to understanding our world, that it can be used to improve the lot of humankind. But if not engaged seriously, Blair thinks, faith can be used to induce ignorance, fear and a withdrawal of communities into mutually antagonistic spheres at just the time that globalization is breaking down barriers between peoples and nations. “Faith is part of our future,” Blair says, “and faith and the values it brings with it are an essential part of making globalization work.”
….Blair now wants to tap into the global links that have been built between development activists and people of faith. “Faith,” he says, “can be a civilizing force in globalization,”…
… One senses, however, that it is not just relations among faiths that Blair wants to influence. It is also the relationship between those who rejoice in their faith and those who think religion is something quaint, the stuff of history books. And here Blair’s religious agenda intersects another of his concerns: the growing distance between U.S. and European attitudes toward the world. Blair has enough old-fashioned British reserve to have his doubts about the way religion is used in the American public square. Whenever Blair was on a foreign trip, says a close aide, his staff had to find him a church in which to worship each Sunday-and then try to make sure that the press didn’t learn of it. By contrast, says this aide, “Bush and Clinton are always photographed coming out of church holding a Bible.” But at the same time, Blair insists that Europeans need to understand the importance faith has in American life-and recognize that in its all-pervasive secularism, it is Western Europe, not the U.S., that is out of step with much of the rest of the world. “Europe,” says Blair, “is more exceptional than sometimes it likes to think of itself.”
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