The Archbishop of Canterbury has warned aid agencies about the “perfectly real” dangers of working with faith-based activists and groups in developing countries. Dr. Rowan Williams encouraged secular agencies and NGOs to maintain a “steady vigilance about proselytism, manipulative use of favours, exclusive focus on people of the same faith and other practices that distort the goals of liberation for a whole community”.

He was speaking at a seminar on faith and development, organised by the Tony Blair Faith Foundation in association with the Royal Society of Arts. Williams said the fact these risks were “sometimes exaggerated” and were used as grounds for rejecting the whole idea of partnership with religious bodies “should not blind us to the fact that the dangers are perfectly real”.

“There is a longstanding suspicion towards faith in many quarters of the development establishment, accentuated in recent years by a number of specific issues and coloured by the current nervousness about religious extremism.”

Faith communities did not begin from a “clear Englightenment doctrine” of universal liberties, Williams said. “They are necessarily exclusive in the sense that they are committed to particular beliefs that not everyone shares. There is always a suspicion that they will favour their own or that they are using aid and development as a vehicle for propaganda on behalf of their own convictions, a cloak for proselytism.

“The development agency may come to see religion as a positive obstacle to liberation. Faced with the rise of aggressive religious conservatism all this longstanding unease becomes more sharply focused.”

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