Faith is not a sector

Last night I was in Parliament for the launch of Equi’s report Beyond the Clinic: Faith, Young People and Mental Health. This morning I was on Good Morning Britain discussing the NHS response to Lord Mann’s review of antisemitism.

The timing was accidental. The connection was not.

The Equi report found that 41 per cent of young people who had experienced poor mental health and sought professional support would have sought help earlier had they known services would understand their faith background. A few hours later I was discussing a review that found Jewish staff experiencing rising discrimination within the NHS and Jewish patients feeling uncomfortable identifying themselves openly. The NHS response also recognised the need to tackle anti Muslim hatred alongside antisemitism.

Different reports. Different communities.

Yet both raise the same question: what happens when people lose confidence that institutions understand who they are?

Speaking at the Equi event Professor Ghazala Mir challenged the assumption that treating everybody identically is the same as treating everybody fairly. Professor Javed Khan questioned the language we use when we talk about faith communities, arguing that they are not simply organisations that occasionally support social cohesion but among the places where social cohesion is actually created.

Together with the report’s author Dr Mary Hunter, they exposed a challenge that extends far beyond faith.

We have become remarkably sophisticated at collecting data about people’s identities while becoming less confident about understanding what those identities mean.

For years public institutions have tended to assume that fairness is achieved through uniformity. Treat everyone the same, remove particularities and focus on the presenting issue. Yet there is a difference between treating people equally and treating them as though the things that shape them do not matter.

People do not arrive as abstract service users. They arrive carrying histories, loyalties, responsibilities, fears, communities and sources of meaning. Whether institutions recognise those realities or not, they remain present.

That insight connects the Equi report and the Mann Review.

We often talk about antisemitism, anti-Muslim hatred, mental health, loneliness and social fragmentation as though they are separate challenges. Increasingly they look connected. When people stop believing that institutions understand them, trust begins to erode. When trust erodes, people delay seeking help, withdraw from shared spaces and become more reliant on communities that feel familiar and safe.

The consequences are not theoretical.

If young people delay seeking mental health support because they do not believe services understand them, problems become harder to treat. Early intervention is missed. Distress deepens. Some reach crisis before help arrives. In the most serious cases, lives are lost.

If Jewish patients feel uncomfortable identifying themselves openly within the NHS, confidence in healthcare is damaged. If anti Muslim hatred or antisemitism become normalised, staff disengage, leave or conclude that parts of themselves are best left unspoken.

The immediate harm falls on those directly affected. The wider damage is felt by all of us.

Trust is one of the foundations on which a healthy society rests. Once people stop believing that institutions are for them, they stop turning towards them. Some seek alternatives. Some retreat into communities that feel safer. Some simply withdraw.

The result is not only poorer health outcomes. It is a society that becomes increasingly fragmented, with fewer shared spaces, fewer shared experiences and fewer opportunities to encounter people different from ourselves.

We have seen where that road can lead. Rising antisemitism. Rising anti Muslim hatred. Communities living with fear. Young people struggling in silence. Riots on our streets. Public debate becoming more polarised and more hostile. People increasingly choosing spaces that feel safe rather than spaces that are shared.

When trust weakens, society becomes more brittle and brittle societies struggle in moments of crisis.

The relationships, confidence and understanding that allow communities to respond well to emergencies cannot be created overnight. They have to exist before the crisis arrives. They are built slowly through schools, neighbourhoods, civic institutions, faith communities and countless everyday interactions in which people learn to trust one another.

That is why the conversation about faith literacy matters.

The question is not whether faith communities should occasionally be consulted when a problem emerges. It is whether we understand their role in building the relationships, belonging and trust that make a resilient society possible in the first place.

During the pandemic, public institutions suddenly discovered the importance of faith communities. Ministers, councils and health officials recognised that if they wanted to reach people, they needed trusted relationships. Faith leaders found themselves in conversations that had rarely happened before because government and public services suddenly realised something faith communities had always known: trust already existed in places they had largely overlooked.

The Bloom Review attempted to capture that lesson. Its argument was not that faith communities needed greater recognition for their own sake. It was that public institutions needed to become more faith literate. They needed a better understanding of how faith shapes people’s lives and stronger relationships with the communities that already play a significant role in social wellbeing.

The challenge was never the absence of faith communities from British life. It was the absence of faith literacy within many of the institutions shaping British life.

Years on, the Equi report and the Mann Review suggest that challenge remains only partially addressed. We continue to talk about the “faith sector”, a phrase that is used so often that few people stop to question it.

But faith is not a sector.

There are only people.

People who gather in churches, mosques, synagogues, temples and gurdwaras. People who care for neighbours, support families, volunteer in their communities, notice loneliness and help others navigate grief, meaning and belonging. People whose values shape how they understand themselves and the world around them.

Professor Javed Khan’s challenge was ultimately a challenge to how we think about society itself. Faith communities are not simply organisations that support social cohesion. They are among the places where cohesion is built.

That matters because social cohesion cannot be manufactured through policy initiatives alone. It grows through relationships, trust and shared purpose. Those things are created locally, repeatedly and often quietly. Faith communities are not the only places where that work happens, but they remain among the most significant.

The Equi report and the Mann Review are ultimately asking the same question. Are our institutions capable of understanding the people they serve in all the complexity of their identities, communities and experiences?

We spend a great deal of time talking about inclusion. Far less time asking whether people feel understood.

The two are not the same thing.

The Equi report and the Mann Review are reminders that trust cannot be assumed. It must be earned, maintained and renewed. Trust is not a soft outcome. It is part of the infrastructure of a healthy society. Once it begins to erode, people stop seeking help, communities retreat into themselves and institutions lose the confidence on which they depend.

That is not simply a challenge for the NHS or for faith communities.

It is a warning about the commitments needed if we want to create the society that we can all trust.