A unique report on faith in Glasgow by academics at Edinburgh University and commissioned jointly by the Scottish Executive and Glasgow City Council has highlighted the tensions between faith groups and local government in efforts to carry out public service.
The report, Faith Communities and Local Government in Glasgow: 2005, on Scotland’s largest city was compiled using figures from the 2001 census, the first to include detailed religious questions in Scotland since 1851.Despite most faith groups interacting to various degrees with Glasgow City Council, some participants from GCC acknowledged in the report that, “on the whole, their departments tended to engage with the most articulate and most organised faith groups”.
The researchers also found that there was a “wide disparity in the ability of different faith communities to engage with local government and in their knowledge of what it does and provides”.
The report found that whilst the Jewish community was “well organised, highly skilled and knowledgeable”, some of the Christian, Buddhist, Hindu and Sikh communities are “simply bemused about where to start approaching the City Council”.
Many faith groups also called on local government to publicise its services and policies more, with researchers finding that whilst most faith groups expressed a high level of interest in relationship with the government, especially the City Council, some participants, most notably a number from Christian groupings, said they wanted the Council to “realise what a resource they have in faith groups”.
The report read: “They were anxious that the City Council recognise that faith groups, because of their beliefs, want to work for the betterment of society and that they have substantial resources of personnel with which to do it.”Glasgow is a multi-faith city in which a very large number are no longer cramped into categories of Protestant, Catholic or non-Christian, in which they have been boxed for so long. It is far more nuanced than that.
Dr Michael Rosie, co-author of the report
One unnamed church in the survey said it had 160 university student members willing to volunteer their ‘proto-professional services’ for social action projects, but that the church “had found their efforts hampered by regulations and lack of information”.
