Kazakhstan 2026

Last week I went to Kazakhstan again, for the 24^th meeting of the Secretariat of the Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions. I have now been to Kazakhstan so often that the tour guides recognise me. (Well, only one — but still!)

Because this was the Secretariat, rather than the main Congress, there were only two of us from Jinja Honchō — me, and Revd Abë, the new head of the International Section. There was also only one day of meetings, but the timing of the flights meant that we arrived around 9am the previous day, and so we had one day in Astana. That gave us time to have lunch with our liaison officers from previous years, and visit one of the tourist attractions (Baiterek).

The actual meeting went as normal. Each delegate gave a speech that overran their allotted time, all the other delegates applauded politely, and the position papers presented to the Secretariat were adopted by the chairman saying “I would like to adopt this paper. Are there any objections? Since there are no objections, this has been adopted”, with no pauses.

As I have said before, the meetings of the Secretariat and Congress are not for substantial discussion. They are symbolic occasions at which the representatives of many religions gather in one room, and affirm that they can all work together. Given that, this year again, we had representatives from both Iran and Israel (alphabetical order…) sitting at the table, the importance of the symbolism should not, I think, be understated.

However, this time Jinja Honchō was directly involved in the preparation of one of the position papers, on the role of religions in the fight against climate change. We were sent a draft a few months ago, and invited to make comments.

We did.

The original draft proposed that the concept of humans as stewards of creation for God was a universal idea. We pointed out that it was not — in particular, Shinto does not think that people are looking after the world for the kami, or indeed that the kami created the world in that sense. We explained how Shinto does see things, in terms of reverence for and connection with the whole of nature, and said that we had no objection to stewardship being presented as one approach, as long as it was not asserted to be universal.

The final draft had been completely revised. Our comments had been thoroughly taken into account, and as there were changes that were not connected to our comments, I assume that other people’s comments also had been. The final draft suggested that caring for the natural world was a universal value, along with concern for the impact of environmental change on the most vulnerable. It also listed the range of religious ideals that underwrite that value in different faiths, emphasising that although religions differ on many points, they can agree that wrecking the environment is a bad idea. (This is reminiscent of the idea I talked about last week.)

This time, then, we learned that the Congress and the Secretariat do listen to the opinions of the participants, and reflect them in the official statements. They just don’t do that at the formal meetings. And that, I think, is fair enough. The formal meetings do important symbolic work. It is not reasonable to expect them to do practical work as well.