Religion | Munk Debates

Tony Blair

"Religious faith has a major part to play in shaping the values which guide the modern world, and can and should be a force for progress. "

Tony Blair served as Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from 1997 to 2007, the only Labour leader in the party’s 100 year history to win three consecutive elections. After his resignation, he was appointed Special Envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East, an office which he held until 2015. 

 In 2008, he formed the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, a nonprofit group that "promotes respect and understanding about the world’s religions through education and multi-faith action."

Since leaving office Tony Blair has spent most of his time working on three areas: supporting governments to deliver effectively for their people, working for peace in the Middle East, and countering extremism. He currently runs the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change where he focuses on addressing the difficult challenges in the world today, including how the centre ground of politics renews itself with practical policy solutions.

Christopher Hitchens

"If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world."

Christopher Hitchens was a British-American author, journalist and literary critic. He was a columnist at Vanity Fair, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, Slate, Free Inquiry, and a variety of other media outlets. Hitchens was also a political activist, whose best-selling books, flamboyance and erudition made him a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits.

An outspoken atheist and antitheist, Hitchens described himself as a believer in the Enlightenment values of secularism, humanism and reason. His 2007 best-selling book God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything suggests that organized religion is "violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children."