New York, USA - Tony Blair launches his Faith Foundation in New York today, saying that he wants to spend most of his remaining years ensuring that religion is seen as a force for good in the world.
The new organisation, for which he is seeking hundreds of millions of pounds of charitable funding, will focus on developing better understanding between faiths as well as fostering concrete action on fighting poverty and disease. “In the end, this will be what I dedicate a very large part of my life to,” he told The Times yesterday.
Although the foundation's headquarters will be in London, Mr Blair said that he wanted its reach to extend across North America, Europe, Asia, the Far East and the Middle East. Mr Blair insisted that it would be wrong to interpret his decision to launch the foundation at the headquarters of Time Warner in New York as evidence that America, with its strong religious base, was more fertile territory for his message than a home country where he was forced out of office amid mounting unpopularity a year ago.
“We are doing reasonably well raising money in both places,” he said, pointing out that he had already spoken about the project at Westminster Cathedral last month.
Mr Blair shows no signs, however, of hankering after British politics. He declined to comment on the problems afflicting Gordon Brown, saying that it would be a bad mistake to be seen as intervening from afar. “I wish my own country and the Government nothing but good,” he added, before acknowledging that having been Prime Minister for as long as he had “you know when it's time to move on”.
Indeed, after spending much of his decade in Downing Street fighting shy of discussing his deep Christian convictions for fear of alienating Britain's largely secular society, he is now free of such constraints.
In his New York speech today, he will say: “Religious faith will be of the same significance to the 21st century as political ideology was to the 20th century. In an era of globalisation, there is nothing more important than getting people of different faiths and cultures to understand each other better and live in peace and mutual respect, and to give faith itself its proper place in the future.”
Mr Blair said that his work for the new foundation would dovetail with his job as peace envoy to the Middle East, a region where religion has too often been “a source of conflict rather than reconciliation”.
He declined to answer questions about how the latest scandal surrounding Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, would affect fragile and faltering progress in the region, but said: “The peace process remains absolutely essential and fundamental to the peace of the world.”
There have been suggestions that his foundation, as well as his role in negotiations between the Palestinians and neighbouring Arab countries, could by hampered by his stalwart support over the past six years for President Bush's War on Terror. Some Muslims see it has a new Crusade while the Religious Right has often characterised it as a clash of civilisations. Mr Blair said that even most opponents of the war did not seriously believe that it had a religious motivation, and those that did “were largely limited to extreme people”.
He was booed this week by peace protesters at Yale University and a speech on religion at Westminster Cathedral last month, marking his public debut as a Roman Catholic convert, was similarly disrupted. Mr Blair insisted yesterday, however, that both demonstrations were small and that he had not encountered such sentiments in the Middle East.
He is involved in designing courses at Yale for those seeking to promote faith as an alternative to conflict and his foundation will pursue Millennium Development goals by promoting inter-faith co-operation to fight malaria, a disease that Mr Blair pointed out yesterday kills hundreds of thousands of children in Africa each year, 40 per cent of whom are Muslims.
At his launch today, he will argue that religion, particularly the Abrahamic faiths of Christianity, Islam and Judaism, have to be rescued from those who would use it to create division or others who wish to write if off as an irrelevance.
Mr Blair says that all faiths have the values of respect, justice and compassion in common. His London headquarters will be at Abraham House, a library and museum, which will be an inter-faith forum to heal the extremism that he acknowledges had scarred British society in recent years.
Britain's reputation as a country living in fear of its home-grown Muslim terrorists is unfair, he said. “The people who capture the headlines and make the most noise are not necessarily representative of their own faith, let alone religion more generally.”
He does acknowledge, however, that Britain, where he once told his advisers that they were a most un-Godly lot, is, along with much of the Continent, out of step with the rest of the world in its secularism.
“Europe,” he said in another recent interview, “is more exceptional than sometimes it likes to think of itself.”
An ex-PM's career
June 2007 Tony Blair is appointed Middle East envoy for the Quartet - the EU, UN, US and Russia
November Hired by Washington Speakers Bureau Inc for worldwide speaking tour. Reportedly received £300,000 in the first week of his tour of North America
January 2008 Retained by JP Morgan Chase & Co as part-time adviser. Is subsequently reported to be earning a package worth £2million a year
January Advisory role on climate change and international politics to the Swiss insurer Zurich. Believed to be paid £500,000 a year. To be accountable to chief executive and take part in seminars
January Appointed unpaid adviser to Rwandan Government
— On international lecture circuit, can charge £100,000-£200,000 per speech. Said to have received £240,000 to address Chinese businessmen last November
— Has a £4.6million deal with Random House for his memoirs