THE ARCHBISHOP of Canterbury urged Christians, Jews and Muslims yesterday to stand together and support one another as society’s secular mistrust of religion continues to grow.

Delivering his annual Christmas Day sermon as leader of the Church of England, Rowan Williams called on all religions to speak out for each other in times of “stress or harassment” and to continue promoting tolerance of difference.

Dr Williams, speaking at Canterbury Cathedral, said that secular fears about religion in today’s society posed problems for believers. The Archbishop noted what he described as sniggering in the media over Tony Blair’s faith.

“It isn’t all that surprising if a secular environment looks at religion not only with suspicion or incomprehension but with fear,” he said.

“The proposal to ban Muslim headscarves in French schools suggests that there is still a nervousness about letting commitment show its face in public.”

Dr Williams, who this week attacked the Government’s anti-terrorism measures and gave warning of the dangers of alienating Britain’s moderate Muslims, said: “Discomfort about religion or about a particular religion may be the response of an educated liberal or, at the opposite extreme, the unthinking violence of an anti-Semite; it isn’t easy to face the fact that sometimes the effects are similar for the believer.

“And in case we think the whole debate is just a French problem, we should recognise just a little of the same unease in the nervous sniggering about the Prime Minister’s religious faith which ripples over the surface of the media from time to time.”

The Archbishop also admitted that “religious faith has too often been the language of the powerful, the excuse for oppression, the alibi for atrocity”.

He said: “It has appeared as itself intolerant of difference (hence the legacy of anti-Semitism), as a campaigning, aggressive force for uniformity, as a self-defensive and often corrupt set of institutions indifferent to human welfare.

“That’s a legacy that dies hard, however much we might want to protest that it is far from the whole picture. And it’s given new life by the threat of terror carried out in the name of a religion — even when representatives of that religion at every level roundly condemn such action as incompatible with faith.”

Dr Williams went on: “Faith is not either a perversion of human freedom or a marginal and private eccentricity.

“So Christian faith does not seek to carve out a territory to defend, nor does it look to take over a potentially rebellious world and subdue it by force.”

The Archbishop said that the Christian faith had to show it was on the side of humanity by “patient loyalty to people in their need, by courage and sacrifice for the sake of justice, by labour for reconciliation, setting people free from the threat of violence”. Dr Williams also spoke out this week on how financial debt — the “dark side of Christmas” — was threatening the survival of the family.

He said that it was in danger of “slipping out of control” and went on to attack the Government for its plans to open super-casinos and proposals to charge university top-up fees.

The leader of Roman Catholics in England and Wales, the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy- O’Connor, did not give a homily this year because he is recovering from a hip replacement.

His message on the Diocese of Westminster website said that Jesus came into a world just “as violent and uncertain”, and that “the true meaning of the Nativity cannot be experienced without a sense of this insecurity and fragility which is part of our human story”.

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