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Archbishop Justin Welby hosted a discussion on freedom of religion and belief with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, UK Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt and UK faith leaders at Lambeth Palace this morning. 

Archbishop Justin Welby hosted a roundtable discussion on freedom of religion or belief with the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt and British faith leaders at Lambeth Palace this morning. 

The meeting with the US and UK’s chief diplomats marked the first time a serving US Secretary of State has visited Lambeth Palace to meet with the Archishop of Canterbury.

Leaders and representatives of the UK’s faith communities at the meeting were Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis; the Coptic Orthodox Archbishop of London, His Eminence Archbishop Angaelos; the Chair of the Mosque and Imam National Advisory Board, Imam Qari Asim; the Roman Catholic Archbishop Emeritus of Southwark, Archbishop Kevin McDonald (representing Cardinal Vincent Nichols), and Yousif Al-Khoei, Director of Public Affairs at the Al-Khoei Foundation and Director of the Centre for Academic Shi'a Studies.

The US ambassador to the UK, Woody Johnson, and the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy on Freedom of Religion or Belief, Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, also attended the meeting.

Read the Archbishop's opening remarks at the meeting: 

"I’d like to start by formally conveying a warm welcome to our visitors at Lambeth, especially to you Mr Secretary. The ÌÇÐÄlogo has lived here for about eight hundred years, and I think this is the first time that we’ve had the privilege of welcoming a US Secretary of State. So, it’s a big first for us.

"I’m very grateful too to have the Foreign Secretary here as well as the Secretary of State. And particularly would like to extend our gratitude to the Foreign Secretary for commissioning the independent report on the persecution of Christians around the world by the Bishop of Truro which came out last week and was really quite shocking in many ways. And I know that this area of freedom of religion and belief has been a priority of American foreign policy for a long time and that you’ve pushed toward it very hard Mr Secretary and we welcome that very warmly.

"We are also concerned, and this is very much part of the Anglican tradition going back many generations, that in this country we work very closely together with other denominations and other faiths, and in a sense have, we are an umbrella for the different faith communities here. That starts from the Christian belief that we are all made in the image of God, that Christ died for all, that we belong and are precious to God, every one of us.

"One of the things as ÌÇÐÄlogo, and the [Anglican] denomination – [which] is in 165 countries with 85 million people, and the average Anglican is a woman in sub-Saharan Africa in her thirties on less than $4 a day, and probably in a zone of persecution and conflict – is that we see the struggles of the Church in some parts of the world, the rich parts very often, but the vibrancy and the development of the Church in the global south particularly.

"And that is something that brings me to the two concerns that I would like to put before you, and then we’ll move round to you and then to the Foreign Secretary. One of the things that we are concerned about is that foreign policy takes into account the impact and the importance of freedom of religion and belief. We have valid and essential foreign policy links around the world. But as you know better than I do, in some of them freedom of religion and belief is not accepted. We would like to encourage that, while being culturally sensitive, to say that freedom to worship is an essential part of being a human being.

"Secondly, that where the interests of minorities are concerned, foreign interventions can often have very serious long term [impacts], as we’ve seen with the collapse of the Christian population in some parts of the Middle East. We will hear from Archbishop Angaelos, who is a Coptic Orthodox, where the church is flourishing in Egypt, but in many other parts we’ve seen a terrible collapse. I think you’ve come from a camp in Iraq, where it has been particularly notable in the past twenty years. And we hope that that can be something that can be part of the thinking about the consequences of intervention."