ANGLICAN-TURNED ROMAN CATHOLIC TONY BLAIR LAUNCHES INTERFAITH EFFORT TO SOLVE GLOBAL PROBLEMS

By Lee Penn
The Christian Challenge
July, 2008

Former California Episcopal Bishop William Swing, who has nurtured his interfaith dream, the United Religions Initiative (URI), since the mid-1990s, may be about to be upstaged by Anglican-turned-Roman Catholic Tony Blair.

The former British Prime Minister is moving fast out of the gate with his own interfaith venture, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, which he launched in New York City on May 30.

Blair is now promising to “spend the rest of my life” promoting interfaith understanding and harnessing the energy of religions to solve global problems.

“Faith is part of our future … and faith and the values it brings with it are an essential part of making globalization work,” Blair said in May.

“The point of the inter-faith efforts,” he said recently, “is keeping minds open, because extremism shuts them down.” Such rhetoric is strikingly similar to that used by Bishop Swing in promoting the URI in the 1990s.

Blair’s foundation will collaborate with other organizations to implement the eight Millennium Development Goals, adopted by the UN in 2000. The Faith Foundation’s initial priority will be to combat malaria by providing mosquito nets for beds in affected developing countries. Blair said, “If you’ve got churches and mosques and those of the Jewish faith working together to provide the bed nets that are necessary to eliminate malaria … what a fantastic thing that would be. That would show faith in action, it would show the importance of cooperation between faiths, and it would show what faith can do for progress.” The Foundation will also open a conference center in London, and will work with Yale University to prepare curricula to educate people about the world’s religions.

In his New York speech, Blair disavowed any intent to compete with other interfaith organizations, or to create a melting-pot religion (which some say is the URI’s objective): “There are many excellent meetings, convocations, conferences and even organizations that work in the interfaith area. We do not want to replicate what they do. We do not want to engage in a doctrinal inquiry. We do not want to subsume different faiths in one faith of the lowest common denominator.”

Unlike Swing’s URI – which includes majority as well as minority belief systems, such as Scientology, Unificationism, and Wicca – Blair’s interfaith movement will concentrate on working with six major world religions: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism. It aims to raise “a war chest of several hundred million dollars” for its projects in the Third World. One of Blair’s aides said that “tens of millions” of dollars have already been raised through support from individuals, foundations, businesses, and governments. If so, this would place the Faith Foundation far ahead of the URI, whose annual headquarters budget remains well below $2 million. President Clinton and UN officials attended the Foundation’s kick-off ceremony.

In contrast to the URI, the Faith Foundation has gained cooperation from Evangelicals. It has also garnered support from Anglicans and Roman Catholics (though the latter two Churches both include some leaders who have supported the URI). Rick Warren, the founder and senior pastor of the Saddleback mega-church, is a member of the Blair Foundation’s advisory board; so are the Church of England’s Bishop of London, Richard Chartres; the Rev. David Coffey, President of the Baptist World Alliance; the Rev. Joel Edwards, the General Director of the Evangelical Alliance; and the Rt. Rev. Josiah Idowu-Fearon, the Anglican Bishop of Kaduna, Nigeria. The Foundation expects that Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, Archbishop of Westminster, will join the Advisory Council once he has retired. Blair said in May that Pope Benedict XVI and Vatican officials were “very supportive” when he told them about plans for the new interfaith foundation.

Sources: Time Magazine, The Times Online (UK), The New York Times, Tony Blair Faith Foundation website, United Religions Initiative
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