Category: politics

What next for Iran’s overlooked minorities?

It is an anxious time to be Iranian, but even more so if you’re part of a minority community. Will the US assault on Iran lead to a mass exodus or a longed-for new start?

Five days since the start of President Trump’s bombing of Iran and the assassination of its senior leaders, the question of what comes next hangs in the air like plumes of dust from the rubble.

Lord (William) Hague has summarised the options as “repression, chaos or liberation”. Repression – again – by the country’s brutal Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, chaos if the country falls into civil war, and liberation if somehow millions of Iranians welcome the pro-Western Reza Pahlavi to lead the country to democracy.

Reports that Mojtaba ​Khamenei, the son of assassinated Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is tipped to be the frontrunner, have set the needle hovering between the first two of those options.

It is an anxious time to be Iranian, but even more so if you’re part of a minority community. Why do they matter? The Islamic Republic is not just home to Shia (89 per cent) and Sunni Muslims (10 per cent), but to ancient communities of Zoroastrians, Jews, Baha’i and Assyrian and Armenian Christians. Their very presence in the Islamic Republic challenges its ideology, and they have complained of being treated like second-class citizens.

Even more problematic for the regime are Shia who abandon the national creed and become atheist, or Evangelical Christian. A 2020 report found some 1.5 per cent of Iranians identified as Christian, meaning converts alone could number around 500,000. But because “apostates” can face jail, some have fled Iran. Some wash up on UK shores – and in such numbers that the Church of England has devised a Farsi-language Communion liturgy for them. Each conversion away from Shi’ism is a quiet rejection of the 1979 Revolution.

Above: Article 18 advocates for the rights of Iranian Christians

Iranian-born Dr Sara Afshari, research tutor at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies, has described “religious disengagement and conversion” as a form of political dissent.

Writing during the January protests, in which the IRGC slaughtered 3,000 demonstrators according to official figures (or up to 30,000 according to activists) she explained: “For many, conversion has not been only a spiritual journey, but a symbolic refusal – an existential “no” to religious coercion and political control.”

Steve Dew-Jones, news director of the charity Article 18, says he worries that if the regime clings on, it could hit out at its minority populations and those in prison or awaiting trial, who include nearly 60 Christians. (Update: Reuters has reported Evin prison, where many are held, has been bombed and Open Doors has said food distribution and communications have been cut off and prisoners are being moved to undisclosed locations.) A fresh wave of state-sponsored repression could, according to Le Monde, catch anyone picked up by facial recognition cameras.

Other easy targets whose arrests would spread fear would include members of “underground” congregations. Those initially dancing in the streets have included Iranians of all creeds – but minorities are easy to scapegoat. The regime, which enjoys spying on its own people, won’t give up without a fight: the Revolutionary Guard is believed to have more than 190,000 members embedded deep in the country’s population of 93 million, in addition to the forces of the Iranian Army.

Resources on the Diocese of London's website for Farsi-speakers
Above: Some Church of England dioceses offer materials for Iranian worshippers, noting “many have powerful testimonies of … transformation – often at great personal cost”

A variant of this possibility, “regime readjustment”, could see a tamed regime allowed to continue, on conditions set by the US, as has happened in Venezuela. Iran’s nuclear capabilities and oil reserves would be obvious targets for US negotiators but Trump has not condemned Iran’s poor religious rights record.

Quite a contrast from the US’s intervention in Nigeria on Christmas Day, which Trump framed as protecting the country’s Christians from genocide, or even the 2003 Iraq invasion, which President Bush justified as a mission to export democracy. So if the Iranian regime is permitted to carry on as before except in a few areas, Christian persecution will most likely carry on unchecked.

However, if US-Israeli bombing removed any new leader and enough of the regime for separatist groups to start civil conflict, the ensuing chaos could be even worse for Iran’s minorities. According to CNN, the CIA is working to arm Kurdish forces and other Iranian opposition groups with the aim of fomenting a popular uprising in Iran.

Certainly the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and the messy collapse of Saddam Hussein’s government led to total social disintegration. An exodus of minorities followed, that included an estimated five-sixths of Iraq’s Christians. These were ordinary citizens who had had enough of being scapegoated by compatriots and forgotten by US-led troops.

US military planning, such as there was, had not bargained on an Al Qa’eda insurgency or the emergence of ISIS. Both jihadist militias were catastrophic for minorities, and their indulgence in gruesome killings succeeded in attracting new recruits from around the world.

Iranian Christians know they are socially vulnerable and could be made more so by a breakdown in law and order. If they felt it was safer to flee, we might see more of them at Calais and in our churches.

Violence can spread quickly in the Middle East. Last night the Chaldean Catholic Archbishop of Erbil in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq posted on X that drones had damaged an apartment block built for local Catholics, and a nearby convent. Again some Iraqi Catholics are fearing that they should flee.

Liberation might seem the most far-fetched of the possibilities on Iran’s horizon, with a secular democracy that contributed to the peace and stability of the whole region. It is clear that there is huge popular support inside Iran for greater freedoms – freedom for women to discard the veil, freedom to walk away from Shi’ism, freedom for Iran’s LGBT community to become more visible.

The American values the revolutionaries rejected in 1979 seem less objectionable to many Iranians now; American exports such as iPhones and Instagram have proven a hit. This would be the best environment for Iran’s minorities to thrive as equal citizens. But is it possible to leap from autocracy to democracy?

Dew-Jones believes so. “If there was any chance that the people could actually decide and be empowered,” he says, then peaceful regime change could occur, led in the short term by exiled prince Reza Pahlavi, “who appears to be the person whom Iranians inside and outside, not exclusively but by and large, are calling on to lead the transition.”

Realistically, if the US wants Iran to morph into a secular, liberal, non-nuclear regime, it will have to help pay for it. One lesson, from Egypt where the so-called Arab Spring failed to bring about lasting change, is that democracy is not achieved in one regime change or one election: it is the gradual building up of a multi-layered culture of empowerment, respect and rights.

However, another lesson, from Iraq, whose current stability is far from perfect, is that without adequate planning and support, a poorly defined hope of regime change can take years to realise and cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

Above: Aida Najaflou, an Iranian convert to Christianity, who was arrested in February 2025 and has been sentenced to 17 years in jail for offences against the Islamic Republic including involvement in an underground “house church”, the longest sentence given an Iranian Christian last year related to their faith. Photo: Article 18

The government risks shooting itself in the foot over VAT relief scheme

Ahead of Wednesday’s budget Rachel Reeves is having to hunt for cash behind every sofa cushion. But if she removes help to repair places of worship, she could find unintended consequences await

Imagine if you had tens of thousands of volunteers who were motivated to give their time simply because they wanted to make the world a kinder, fairer place. Imagine that their volunteering plugged gaps left unfilled by government and neighbours. Imagine that all these helpful souls needed was somewhere safe and warm to operate from, but without that, they’d have to give up and go home.

This isn’t hard to imagine, of course, because it’s the situation the government finds itself in vis à via the vast array of community work done or hosted by the nation’s places of worship.

The National Churches Trust has estimated that the social and economic wellbeing benefit of the UK’s churches is worth £55bn. That takes the form of food banks, warm spaces, debt counselling, after-school clubs – providing the safety net that prevents people in need from slipping further into poverty or isolation and potentially require more costly intervention by the state.

You’re not going to attract a dementia café or mums and toddlers club to an unheated Victorian barn.

Because many churches are old, leaky and creaky, (some 45 per cent of the UK’s Grade I listed buildings are maintained by the CofE), their congregations want to do the only responsible thing and fix the roof, update the windows, install more efficient heating. You’re not going to attract a dementia café or mums and toddlers club to an unheated Victorian barn.

What made such repairs easier was the Listed Places of Worship Grant scheme put in place in 2001 by Gordon Brown, Reeves’ predecessor as chancellor (rewind past the Tory ones and Alistair Darling), which allowed Listed Places of Worship grants to cover the VAT on repair bills higher than £1,000. Brown understood the contribution faith communities would willingly make.

Yet in April it was suddenly announced that the scheme would only award grants up to £25,000, leaving any major project that was under way or about to begin either scrabbling to find hundreds of thousands of pounds or having to go back to the drawing board to be scaled down. A few churches have supporters with deep pockets, most don’t. 

As the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, told the Sunday Telegraph, “The vast majority of fundraising for our churches is done locally by heroic volunteers and we are deeply grateful for all they do. For more than 20 years, they have relied on the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme to give that crucial bit of extra help.” There are fears it could be scrapped all together.

Volunteers at a church that runs many social projects
Volunteers at St Laurence Church in Chorley, Lancashire, (also above) which has had to postpone finishing roof repairs because of the cap on VAT relief. Photo: CofE

Clearly, ahead of Wednesday’s autumn budget, the chancellor, Rachel Reeves is having to hunt behind every sofa cushion to find cash that can be put towards reducing the national debt. Aside from these buildings’ heritage value, ending the Listed Places of Worship scheme might make some sense if churches only served as a self-righteousness boost for the few.

But a survey published by the Church of England late last week found that two in five people, or 43 per cent of all adults, reported having had contact with their local church, 23 per cent of those – nearly seven million people in the UK – “for community support such as parent toddler groups, lunch clubs and food banks”. The CofE, which runs or supports 31,300 social action projects, estimates that “2.8 million people, 4 per cent of the UK population, have been in contact with their local church for a food bank.”  

The churches have shown themselves to be a trusted partner of government. They shut their doors during the pandemic, aware they had to set an example to other faith communities even though many of their own members were furious; they rallied support for the Coronation of King Charles with the bellringing initiative Ring for the King.

Yet even cathedrals, irreplaceable treasures, are not immune. Jo Kelly-Moore, Dean of St Albans and Chair of the Association of English Cathedrals, said: “The threat to end the Listed Places of Worship Grant, and the cap currently imposed, is having a hugely negative impact on our cathedrals, many of which have long-term repair and renewal projects costing hundreds of thousands of pounds.” Cathedrals are often criticised for charging visitors to look around, yet how else are they supposed to keep the lights on? (And they do stress that anyone wanting a space to pray can be shown in without charge.)

Cutting costs where heritage places of worship are concerned is short-term thinking. Churches come with ready-made goodwill and generally accessible premises. If churches cannot host community events because they are too cold or simply unsafe, alternative provision will sooner or later end up costing the state, undermining what Ms Reeves is trying so hard to achieve.

Boris Johnson is on to something – the obesity crisis could point to a deeper malaise

Boris Johnson wishes religious leaders would address the “aching spiritual void in people’s lives”. He makes a good point

It was one of the most intriguing headlines I had seen in years: “Boris Johnson blames the Church of England for obesity crisis”. Of all the shortcomings our rotund former PM could pin on the Church, that was not one I had expected.

He had recorded his comments for the National Food Survey, an independent review by the Government, before the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, announced two weeks ago that he was stepping down, taking “personal and institutional responsibility” for safeguarding failings.

Welby’s move has prompted a good deal of raking over personal and institutional failings, much of which has circled around the undeniable reality of declining church attendance.

What is up with people that they plainly are seeking solace in something that they know is self-destructive?

Academics have tried to understand this numerical trend of the last 50 years or so, and pointed to, among others, a desire for greater sexual freedoms, the end of deference culture, clergy failing to keep up with social change, and people having more disposable income and greater expectations of individualism.

However, Johnson made an astute point about “what is obviously an aching spiritual void in people’s lives, that drives them to gorge themselves”. “Religious leaders, as well as politicians, they think, ‘what is up with people that they plainly are seeking solace in something that they know is self-destructive’. And when did you last hear the Archbishop of Canterbury preach a sermon about that?”  

And as if to bear it out, this week also heard about Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s plans to help people on long-term benefits back into work.

According to the white paper in which the plans were outlined, a record 2.8 million people are out of work due to long-term sickness, and “economic inactivity is higher in some coastal and ex-industrial communities”. The paper proposes expanding access to mental health and musculoskeletal services, and tackling obesity. Analysis by The Times found that “the problems are concentrated in the poorer, ‘left behind’ places that successive governments have failed to level up, where obesity, inactivity, addiction, depression and hopelessness caused by lack of opportunity can become a mutually reinforcing spiral … Some 69 per cent of those claiming incapacity benefits cite mental health conditions and 47 per cent cite musculoskeletal problems, with the average claimant having 2.7 illnesses which often interact with each other.”

“Work is a necessity, part of the meaning of life on this earth, a path to growth, human development and personal fulfilment”

Pope Francis

What if some of these problems point to, to quote Johnson, a spiritual void? One that is also not filled by over-eating, substance misuse and inactivity? Many poorer areas are post-industrial, ie where mining or manufacturing, which used to provide the economic foundations of those communities, have departed for cheaper climes, leaving the old workforce without a job, without alocal work stream, and without the community and way of life that grew up around it. The white paper stresses that there is work to be done – as they immigration stats bear out – but new forms of work have been slow to fill the gaps that were left, or have appeared in different areas, or may not offer the same level of community or, in its stead, fulfilment.

Why would this count as a spiritual void? Because as the Work and Pensions Secretary, Liz Kendall MP, acknowledged in the white paper, work itself can provide “dignity and purpose”, and people of faith would argue that dignity is God-given. The so-called Protestant work ethic puts a positive moral value on doing a job well, and the place of dignified work is important in Catholic Social Teaching. Pope Francis has said: “Work is a necessity, part of the meaning of life on this earth, a path to growth, human development and personal fulfilment. Helping the poor financially must always be a provisional solution in the face of pressing needs. The broader objective should always be to allow them a dignified life through work.”

Material help, in the form of cash benefits, can meet material needs. However, any initiative that offers the person who is long-term sick counselling and physiotherapy could make only temporary progress if the reason for their depression and back trouble is exacerbated by not having meaningful work and a meaningful community life to get out of bed for.

It is rare to find a preacher talk about eating disorders, body image and self-destructive behaviour in a way that is not glib

Perhaps what Johnson was alluding to was that it shouldn’t be the duty of government to preach hope, and that is what he believes is the task of Churches. Johnson has a lengthy relationship with Church. The twice-divorced father of nine (or thereabouts) children was baptised Catholic, confirmed Anglican and married his current wife, Carrie, at Westminster Cathedral. Around a decade earlier, while he was mayor of London, I heard Johnson addressing an interfaith group of community leaders with a fond and clear recollection of a Sunday School lesson. It concerned the achievements of Rahab the prostitute but had some relevance for 2010s London that was something to do with faith without deeds being dead (look up James 2). More recently, Johnson described himself as a “very, very bad Christian,” but judging by his comments to the food survey, in this instance he could be commended as a refreshingly honest and thoughtful one. 

A few points then: when one of the main sources of employment for a town shuts, a viable replacement or replacements need to be available, or a kind of social depression will follow, that can take decades to recover from. Expectations of work that provides meaning – and enjoyment – have grown in the social media age, not always in ways that have matched the jobs and salaries that are on offer.

Historically, religious industrialists such as the Quakers were motivated by a holistic vision for society to open factories and look after the needs – including the spiritual needs – of their employees (albeit in a way we might regard as paternalistic). These days we expect business to step in, but there may be scope for partnerships forged between business, the state and the third sector. The government’s plans draw in employers such as the Premier League, Channel 4 and the Royal Shakespeare Company may inspire young job-seekers, though it is to be hoped that enough jobs in these competitive sectors can be found.

Second, Johnson clearly expects church-going to nurture the soul, and I hear his comments as a plea for churches to be more emotionally literate. It is rare to find a preacher who will talk about eating disorders, body image and self-destructive behaviour and link them in a way that is not glib to the way that a relationship with God can come to fill the spiritual void. The church I attended as a student did just that, and as a result attracted many people who found considerable healing there.

Finally, if Johnson has felt frustrated by a lack of spiritual content in newsworthy comments made by an archbishop, a better way to find out whether the Church is preaching its message of hope is perhaps not to tune into HQ but to pop into the local branch.

In the House of God

Try walking with one eye shut, and then re-open your other eye. You get that moment of sudden greater understanding when you get to see your surroundings in 3D again.

Sometimes there is a way of looking at the world that shows us a dimension we had missed. A way that explains a person’s priorities, their concerns, their red lines, the communities with whom they share concerns. A dimension not always obvious.

What does the Greens’ co-leader Carla Denyer have in common with Ruth Cadbury, who is descended from the confectioners and social reformers? What does that mean for the values they espouse? Why was new Hindu MP Uma Kumaran so proud to meet Pope Francis, whom she whom she hailed as “probably the world’s foremost climate leader”?

For my article in this week’s issue of The Tablet I delve into the increased religious diversity that’s now filling the benches of the House of Commons, and take a look at what it could mean in practice.

This isn’t about tribalism – thank God. This is about the way our elected politicians understand, navigate and value difference. We have MPs of all faiths and none representing mixed constituencies fairly and faithfully. In July’s election we had Muslim MPs standing against fellow Muslims of other parties, showing that values derived from the same creed can be expressed in different ways politically.  

So look at the Commons through the lens of religion and see what you hadn’t previously spotted.

Click here.