LONDON, England — As Elder Quentin L. Cook continued his ministry assignment to the Europe North Area, he met with religious and educational leaders at the Coptic Orthodox Church’s Sanctuary at St. Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe in London, England, and at the University of Oxford.
On Wednesday, May 28, in Central London, Archbishop Angaelos hosted Elder Cook of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and five other religious leaders to discuss how religious groups and individuals can exemplify hope in a confused world.
“We need to give people hope, and we need to give people opportunity,” Elder Cook said. In addition to its mission of faith, he said, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has participated around the world in humanitarian projects as a part of that hope. He also talked about the Church’s efforts to provide educational opportunities where few such chances exist.
In addition to these types of efforts by individual churches, Elder Cook said that churches must model what it looks like to work together and to have civil dialogues like this event afforded.
“We need to learn to talk with each other and not have the kind of anger that exists. That is one of the things we could sponsor as religious entities, to lower the tone and make sure our own religion is not doing anything to advocate for anything that would be harmful to another,” he said.
Showing his love for the history of the Restoration of the gospel and that of the country where he served his mission and where his great-grandfather Heber C. Kimball served as one of the Church’s first missionaries, Elder Cook described the circumstances of the day in England around religious freedom.
“We feel an enormous debt of gratitude for the United Kingdom,” Elder Cook said. “They were ahead on religious freedom. They were ahead on abolishing slavery,” he said of the country’s legacy.
In addition to Elder Cook and Coptic Orthodox Archbishop Angaelos, the meeting featured Archbishop Miguel Maury Buendía, Catholic apostolic nuncio to Great Britain; Rabbi Elchonon Feldman, senior rabbi and deputy to the chief rabbi in the United Kingdom; the Rt. Rev. Philip Mounstephen, Anglican bishop of Winchester and member of the House of Lords; Padideh Sabeti, director of the Baháʼí UK Community; and Fareed Ahmad of the National Executive of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community. Elder Michael T. Ringwood, a member of the Presidency of the Seventy, and Elder Alan T. Phillips, a General Authority Seventy and second counselor in the Europe North Area presidency, also attended and participated in the meeting. The gathering was organized and moderated by Matthew Jones of The FoRB (Freedom of Religion or Belief) Foundation.
Some of these religions are held by a majority of the population in different countries around the world. Some are minorities in each country where their observers worship. Religious freedom, however, is not about having power as individual or collectives of religions.
“It’s nothing to do with one faith trying to outdo another faith,” Ahmad said. But in cases where religion is being abused to exert power over others, that has a subsequent effect in other places, he said.
“It has a domino effect. An impact on Baháʼí in Iran, a Muslim in Pakistan, a Christian in Syria, will have consequences across borders,” he said. These come about because of intolerance and extremism, he said.
The Rt. Rev. Mounstephen said individuals who leave their homes looking for a safer place to live are statistically in the religious minority of the location they leave.
“If you look at locations where freedom of religion or belief is most compromised, what you find are toxic mixtures of authoritarianism and fundamentalism and nationalism that are oppressive of minorities,” he said.
Archbishop Angaelos said that to take any group away from a community removes the people and everything they bring with them and creates a monochromatic society.
“I think it is only in working together that we can ever reach any kind of step forward,” he said.
Archbishop Buendía paraphrased the late Pope John Paul II, saying, “Religious freedom is at the heart of human rights.”
He continued by saying that a lack of respect for an individual’s religion is a lack of respect for their conscience and their human rights.
Elder Phillips expressed his gratitude to the group for coming to the table with hard questions and a desire to work together toward their resolution. He also encouraged the leaders to consider how teenagers and others who are growing in their beliefs may contribute to the discussion.
“The new generation doesn’t like to see others marginalized,” he said.
Seated next to Elder Phillips for the discussion, Ahmad said one way religious freedom is damaged for all is when members of one religion call those of another their enemies.
“If ‘he’ is the enemy, everything I do against him is justified. He’s not my brother. He’s not like me. He’s the enemy. And that is happening today,” Ahmad said. “When ‘he’ is the enemy, then all respect is finished.”
Rabbi Feldman said a trio of Jewish young men were attacked by a man with a knife only a few days earlier in London in what has been described as an antisemitic act of violence. With a heavy heart, the rabbi said, “We should reach a time where everyone’s freedoms are upheld and protected by each other because we’re so much stronger together.”
Sabeti shared the origins of the Baháʼí religion in Iran and said people of faith are engaged in building their communities and finding solutions to problems despite prejudices.
“Faith communities … are contributing to the advancement of societies that we live in. By persecuting them, they not only violate the human rights, … but also they hinder the progress of a whole population,” she said.
For his part, Jones said he sees religions taking the blame around the world for different conflicts of the past and present.
“The hope that I get from this is that there is a possibility for faith to have common aims,” he said. “The faiths are part of a solution.”
Thanks on the quad at Regent’s Park College
Meeting the following day with Sir Malcolm Evans and Baroness Elizabeth Berridge at the University of Oxford, Elder Cook shared a timeline of religious freedom in the U.K. from the Magna Carta 810 years ago in 1215 to the translation of the King James Bible in 1611 to Sir Edward Coke’s work on the English Common Law in the early 1600s. He noted that he had shared a similar timeline at Pembroke College on the same campus in October 2019.
Elder Cook said he chose to speak at Regent’s Park College because of the religious freedoms that it represents as a result of its Baptist heritage. Those religious freedoms were pivotal to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ missionary work and growth in its early years in the U.K.
From the late 1600s to 1828 the Anglican Church was the only established church for the nation. In the early 1800s the Methodists, Baptists and other non-Anglican faiths had a profound impact on the morality in the U.K.
On May 9, 1828, Parliament repealed the “Test and Corporation Acts” that had kept non-Anglicans from fully engaging in public office and certain professions. This was a significant step toward religious freedom for the so-called nonconformist faiths and believers.
“When our first missionaries to the U.K. arrived in 1837, Heber C. Kimball — and later Orson Hyde — appeared in court and were able to obtain a legal license from secular authorities to preach their faith. That license allowed Elders Kimball and Hyde to certify under oath that Her Majesty, Queen Victoria’s laws would be executed, but specifically excluded the requirement to make oaths of allegiance and supremacy to the established [Anglican] church, which they could not make,” Elder Cook said.
Elder Cook thanked those who represented the religions that helped push for religious freedom to be advanced in the 1800s in the United Kingdom. He noted that their efforts made it possible for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to grow so quickly by 1850 that the number of Latter-day Saints in England outnumbered those in the United States.
Berridge is a member of the House of Lords. Evans is principal of Regent’s Park College at Oxford. They were joined by other recognized scholars and religious freedom advocates. Elder Ringwood and Elder Phillips joined the event with Elder Cook, as well.
“It was a real privilege and pleasure to hear what he had to say about the historic connections and the idea that it is so important that everyone has a space to be able to develop their faith traditions and to explore and practice,” Evans said following Elder Cook’s comments to the group.
Elder Cook had previously thanked the U.K. government for its history of inclusive laws that allowed religious freedom to advance in Britain. During this ministry, Elder Cook felt it was equally important to thank those of the religious community for their efforts to both fight for and thoughtfully preserve those rights over the years.
“One of our purposes in coming here was to give a personal thanks. We feel a debt of gratitude to you,” Elder Cook said.
Evans recognized Elder Cook’s visit as a positive step forward in strengthening the unity of different faith groups in a time of increased divisiveness around the world.
“This is a way that we come together rather than — so many people assume — being pushed apart,” Evans said.
While in Oxford, Elder Cook also visited an office where part of the translation took place for the King James Bible. That office space at Corpus Christi College is now the working office of Mark Wrathall, a professor of philosophy at Oxford. Wrathall said the office belonged to Corpus Christi College President John Rainolds in the early 1600s.
“[Rainolds] was a prominent Puritan theologian in the Church of England who proposed to King James that the church needed a new translation of the Bible,” Wrathall said. He explained how Rainolds and his team would meet in that office to talk about the translations and interpretations of the Bible from Hebrew to their English of the 17th century.
Elder Cook said the meaning of that translation of the Bible is significant to Latter-day Saints and to many other English-speaking Christians. He said being in that historic location was “very special.”
