This week's Sunday Programme on Radio 4 is being beamed round the world from St Ethelburga's. Edward Stourton is introducing a discussion about "religious identity", a recurrent theme in many of our Tent conversations. The BBC are here because we are at the heart of this year's EAST Festival. They want to capture the religious diversity around us in East London where the big issue this week is the impact of Andrew Gilligan's recent Dispatches programme on Channel 4 alleging entryism into Tower Hamlets politics by the Islamic Forum of Europe. There was huge applause on Question Time last night, from the audience in the East London Mosque, when Gilligan was dismissed as "Islamophobic". 

Interesting…. If there is one golden rule at St Ethelburga's (and there aren't many) it's to pause whenever such a heavyweight label is heard. What is happening beneath the surface when people need to demote the complexity of real life to a disparaging slogan?

Islamophobia, like homophobia or misogyny, is real and dangerous. But these words are powerful things, and can be used to dismiss people who are different to us or to stifle genuine inquiry - for instance branding any criticism of the actions of Israel as “anti-Semitic”.

I don’t know whether Gilligan’s allegations hold water. I do know that opinion locally is divided. What’s needed is an honest public conversation, one that encourages people to take responsibility for what they say and to listen to people who think differently. This requires a form of conversation that enables people to disagree rather than dismiss each other. A helpful concept here is disagreement success – raising serious differences of worldview truthfully without sliding  into polarisation, demonising and conflict (disagreement failure). There’s more about this on our new website.

Inherent in every disagreement is something that threatens us at some level. Jung suggests that the negative qualities we see in others reflect our own hidden desires and anxieties, those that are too dangerous to express to ourselves. St Ethelburga’s does not work from a therapeutic perspective, but we do know that conversation that exposes to us that our initial judgements of others are false can have a startlingly transformative effect. And we know that this isn’t necessarily easy. All kinds of factors can polarise our perceptions of others: fear, prejudice, history, belief, self-interest.

Discerning what’s really at stake for us personally when disagreement gets difficult is how we can grow as human beings. This is, I think, why HH The Dalai Lama talks about our enemy being our best teacher. S/he reveals to us something about ourselves that we prefer to deny. I think this is also one meaning of Jesus’ startling injunction to “love our enemies”. It’s not for their sake, but for our own.

We need to learn to be curious about people who think differently, not dismiss them.  They can teach us about ourselves. The alternative is that we erect barricades and toss grenades at each other. People get hurt.

Simon Keyes 7 March 2010