Face to faith

Today people throughout Britain will be gathering round bonfires to celebrate the thwarting of the plot by Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators to blow up parliament. Tonight's will no doubt be a bigger than usual national celebration of the defeat of Catholic treachery, as this year is the 400th anniversary of the gunpowder plot. Already commentators have been suggesting that parallels can be drawn between 1605 and today, given that the plot involved disgruntled religionists turning to terror.

There is another similarity, too; the way in which members of the minority faith were feared and even despised. Today the government considers the solution to be its bill on incitement to religious hatred, which would outlaw written material or behaviour intended to stir up hatred against individuals because of their religion. Significantly, many Catholics, with their own cultural memories of prejudice, consider it to be an unwise move. Baroness Helena Kennedy, the human rights lawyer, says she remembers anti-Catholic taunts from her Glasgow childhood and knows how such treatment can disfigure people's lives. But she believes allowing criticism enables people within a faith to grapple with their own difficulties. And Lord Alton, who was an MP in Liverpool, which also suffered sectarian divisions, fears the bill could be used as a weapon by different factions to silence debate.

What the proponents of the bill and its critics have in common is their concern about religious hatred, the most extreme form of conflict over religion. Fortunately, in this case, extreme also denotes rare. This kind of loathing is not experienced by many people of faith.

But what is more commonly experienced is a suspicion or fear of faith, often based on misunderstanding or lack of knowledge. A clear example can be found in the debate about faith schools. Only last week the Work and Pensions minister Margaret Hodge claimed that faith schools must teach the national curriculum, promote tolerance and not exclude those of other faiths. But the reality is that the vast majority of faith schools are Anglican and Roman Catholic, and they are obliged to teach the national curriculum and regularly inspected by Ofsted. Catholic schools have an extraordinarily large number of nationalities represented by their pupils, and increasingly open their doors to children of other faiths or none. C of E schools, with an honourable role in the history of this country's education, do not base admissions on criteria of faith.

This week Faithworks, a Christian thinktank, said there was an urgent need for false assumptions about faith groups and their role in public life to be tackled. Highfields Happy Hens, a free-range poultry farm and vocational training centre, has one of the lowest re-offending rates of any young offenders programme in Derbyshire. But a scheme to replicate the model had been stalled, Faithworks said, because its manager has made clear that a Christian ethos was at the heart of its success.

But fear is not exclusive to the more secular members of society. Many believers regularly express disquiet about secularist approaches to society and religion. Now the new Pope, Benedict XVI, has made a timely intervention, urging people to engage in "positive secularism" and declaring that the "cultural and spiritual renewal of Italy and the European continent" demand that "secularism be not interpreted as hostility to religion"; religious bodies should not fear secularism, provided it "guaranteed every citizen the right to live his or her religious faith with authentic freedom ..."

Fear on two sides of a divide feeds off itself, leading to further misunderstanding and eventually outright hostility. The challenge is to identify common ground, where the secular and religious can come to some form of entente cordiale. And with many people of faith pledging their commitment to the common good and human rights, the potential for shared values is there. Even if the debate means fireworks along the way.

· Catherine Pepinster is editor of the Tablet, a Catholic weekly.