Lord Blair says religion is regarded as 'irrelevant, old-fashioned and violent'
Religion is regarded by most people as being "irrelevant, old-fashioned and violent", according to Lord Blair of Boughton, the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner.
Lord Blair talked to FPA members about the steady long term fall in violent crime, and how crime has evolved in the UK Photo: EPA
By Richard Edwards, Crime Correspondent 8:00PM GMT 16 Nov 2010
In a lecture last night, the retired police officer, who led Scotland Yard during the 2005 suicide bombings on London's transport system, said that religious leaders were losing the struggle to make it clear that faith impels them to do good deeds.
Islam has been "demonised" as a result of terrorist atrocities carried out in the name of a "distorted" version of the faith, he said. He said it was one of the "great" Abrahamic faiths and a "faith of peace" which had suffered as a result of the “horrors” carried out by individuals.
Lord Blair, who is a devout Anglican, added that he did not understand the "obsession" in his own church over women priests and bishops or the way the Anglican Communion was "tearing itself apart" over homosexuality.
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The former police chief said he also failed to understand the Catholic Church's insistence on priestly celibacy.
Speaking to an audience at the religious Theos think-tank in central London, he said that to most people faith looks "irrelevant, clannish, prejudiced, old-fashioned and violent".
Lord Blair suggested the greatest achievements of history, such as the abolition of slavery and the provision of education or free health care for all, had their origins in the religious impulse.
"Religion should be the most peaceful of all the agencies of social cohesion," he said.
"Its infinite number of unseen and unsung acts of charity and love are not known individually but in total they are part of public consciousness.
"They should be and remain the glue that permits modern society to exist, particularly in an increasingly urbanised age - in other words, they are a bulwark of public order, in the sense of orderliness and tranquility."
In his lecture, Lord Blair also emphasised the importance of doubt in religious faith.
He said certainty of being in the right had fuelled religiously-inspired violence.
"Doubt is part of the mortar of a building faith," he said.
"Unless your faith has been tested by doubt, it is not faith but just an attitude, a retreat from the modern world.
"Doubt in the very nature of faith can surely be a useful companion to a necessary lack of shrill conviction that our own faith is more valuable than that of another."
Lord Blair has spoken openly of his faith since been sacked as Commissioner. In one of his first interviews, he said that his faith kept him going during the storm over the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, who police mistakenly shot in July 2005.
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