Tony Blair has defended the place of Christianity in the public sphere.

He said that people should not be sacked or disciplined for expressing their faith in public.

“My view is that people should be proud of their Christianity and able to express it as they wish,” he said in an interview with The Church of England Newspaper, to be published tomorrow.

The former Prime Minister said the purpose of his Tony Blair Faith Foundation was “to bring people of different faiths together through education and interaction and to combine religious faiths in activity that promotes good”.

Tony Blair, who began to discover his own faith when a teacher prayed with him at school after he heard that his father was seriously ill, said he hoped that teacher would not lose her job today as a result.

“I hope and believe that stories of people not being allowed to express their Christianity are exceptional or the result individual ludicrous decisions,” he said.

He said the Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor was right to draw attention to the risk that faith be treated as a personal eccentricity rather than a formative influence in British society.

“As with all these kinds of issues,” he said, referring to recent reports of people penalised for expressing faith at work, “you can take one or two well publicised stories that are actually exceptions but you end up thinking they are the general rule. My experience is that they are not.”

He admitted that conflict is inevitable between traditional religions and new human rights laws. He said: “The real test of a religion is whether in an age of aggressive secularism it has the confidence to go out and make its case by persuasion.”

He said that all faiths had to show their beliefs “in action”.

Mr Blair said: “That is not to say issues of theology and doctrine are unimportant. On the contrary, at a certain point they are central and crucial. But I think that the starting point is to get people of different faiths to come together and to act together according to basic principle that all religions accept: love your neighbour as yourself.”

Mr Blair, who did not officially “do God” while he was Prime Minister, converted to Catholicism on leaving office and set up his new foundation.

He discussed the struggle to find the right path when socialist beliefs on diversity came up against religions doctrines, such as in the case of Catholic adoption agencies refusing to get involved in gay adoptions.

He said: “I happen to take the gay rights position. But at the time of the Catholic adoption society dispute I was also concerned that these people who were doing a fantastic job were not put out of business. You have got to try to work your way through these issues.”

He also claimed the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, had been misunderstood when he said Sharia seemed inevitable in Britain. “I thought at the time all this was a lot of fuss over nothing.”

At the weekend his wife Cherie Booth, a cradle Catholic, described in a Channel 4 series on Christianity her disappointment about the decline of the religion. “Everywhere you look today churches are being closed, Christians are often being marginalised and faith is something few people like to discuss openly,” she said on Sunday night.