The head of the Anglican Church, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, criticised the British government Saturday, saying it viewed religion as a problem practiced by freaks and foreigners, AFP reported.
"The trouble with a lot of government initiatives about faith is that they assume it is a problem, it's an eccentricity, it's practised by oddities, foreigners and minorities," he said in an interview with the daily Telegraph.
"The effect is to de-normalise faith, to intensify the perception that faith is not part of our bloodstream. And, you know, in great swaths of the country that's how it is," said Williams.
He charged the British government was paying only scant attention to Christians, while instead being intensely focussed on Muslims.
Williams also touched on the widening schism within the Anglican Church over the election last weekend of a second openly gay bishop by in the United States, saying: "It confirms the feeling that they're moving further from the Anglican consensus."
The Episcopal diocese of Los Angeles elected as bishop 55-year-old Reverend Canon Mary Glasspool, who has been in a relationship with another woman since 1988, just months after the US church lifted a ban on gay bishops.
The worldwide Anglican Church could face the same kind of turmoil that erupted in 2003 when openly gay Reverend Gene Robinson of New Hampshire was elected bishop, sparking joy from liberals but outrage among traditionalists.
The more liberal stance of the Episcopalian leadership has increasingly divided congregations and prompted the formation of a breakaway church by conservative Anglicans in the United States, Africa and Australia.
The Vatican made a bid last month for these disaffected Anglican groups by making it easier for them to convert to Roman Catholicism, but Williams downplayed the risk this poses to the Anglican Church.
"But actually I don't think it is a solution," Williams told the Telegraph.
"A great many Anglo-Catholics have good reason for not being Roman Catholics. They don't believe the Pope is infallible," he said.
"And that's why they're still pressing for a solution in Anglican terms, rather than what many of them see as a theologically rather eccentric option on the Roman side."