The spiritual leader of the worldwide Anglican Church used his Christmas message to attack France's decision to ban Muslims from wearing headscarves in schools.
"It isn't all that surprising if a secular environment looks at religion not only with suspicion or incomprehension but with fear," Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said in his sermon.
"The proposal to ban Muslim headscarves in French schools suggests that there is still a nervousness about letting commitment show its face in public."
Williams has been preoccupied with relations between Christians and Muslims over the past year and was a leading critic of the US-led war on Iraq.
French President Jacques Chirac last week declared his support for a ban on "conspicuous" religious insignia -- including the Muslim headscarf, the Jewish skullcap and large Christian crucifixes -- from French state schools.
The ban was recommended by an advisory committee, on grounds that French schools are strictly secular, and Chirac indicated that he would like to see the ban written into law by the start of the next academic year.
"Discomfort about religion or about a particular religion may be the response of an educated liberal or, at the opposite extreme, the unthinking violence of an anti-Semite; it isn't easy to face the fact that sometimes the effects are similar for the believer," Williams said
"And in case we think the whole debate is just a French problem, we should recognise just a little of the same unease in the nervous sniggering about the prime minister's religious faith which ripples over the surface of the media from time to time."
British Prime Minister Tony Blair is a practising Christian.
In a British Sunday newspaper, Williams had previously lashed out at the French government move as "provocative and destructive."