Glasgow Faith Survey Highlights Council-Faith Group Tensions

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.

|TOP|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”.

|QUOTE|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.”

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”.

Faith groups also said they perceived ‘tokenism’ in the way the GCC involved them in decision making: “Their sense was that it is usually done at a late stage, when decisions appear already to have been taken.”

The researchers also reported a “perception among Christian focus group members and interviewees that the Council was trying to sideline Christian groups in order to focus more on minority ethnic groups, and that this was a racial, rather than religious, agenda”.

|AD|The Christian leaders expressed their happiness at minority religious groups becoming better integrated in the city but pointed out that at times this has lead to a “significant distortion” of the representation of differences, with religious groups with less than 300 adherents in the city getting the same number of places on some boards as the Christian community, which has thousands of members across the city.

Faith groups also voiced the widespread perception that being a faith group will prevent them from being granted funding by the City Council.

“This was further amplified by some Christian and Muslim participants who on a number of occasions perceived from the reactions of Council staff that they feared religious groups will try to ‘impose their faith’.

The result is that the participants feel bound to keep quiet about that which is the central motivation for their life and social action. Moreover, they report that they have to enter into ‘spurious partnerships’ (Christian Minister) with other organisations in order to access grants,” read the report.

The report also found the religious tolerance in the city had not improved, with the Forum of Faiths, the Scottish Interfaith Council and GCC all rating the situation as at best ‘average’ and at worst ‘poor’, with participants recognising significant Islamophobia and anti-Jewishness in the city, as well as continuing sectarian problems between Protestant and Catholic Christians.

Dr Michael Rosie, co-author of the report and a lecturer in sociology at Edinburgh University, said: “The novelty of this research is that the last census finally accepted citizens were grown-up enough to answer a question on religion.

“What it has done is show that 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.”

The report can be read in full online, please click here.