Some officials have no grip on how faith shapes the way believers live and cannot distinguish between traditionalist Anglicans and Muslims extremists, Most Rev Justin Welby has said.
The archbishop was quoted by The Telegraph as saying: "Our Government generally is desperately trying to catch up, to understand a world in which they have no grip on what it is to be religious at all; where religious illiteracy is prevalent and extremely destructive of understanding and where they can't see really the difference between an extremist Muslim group like the Muslim Brotherhood and a sort of conservative evangelical group in a Church of England church."
He highlighted the problem in the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence during a speech before Church of England school leaders in Somerset.
A lovely welcome to Exmoor and wonderful turnout from the young farming community for #ABCBathWells pic.twitter.com/gTMK2iemmM
— Diocese Bath & Wells (@BathWells) November 7, 2016
Archbishop Welby began a three-day visit to the Diocese of Bath and Wells on Monday with a focus on education and rural issues, meeting with headteachers and senior teachers at Somerset County Cricket Club in Taunton.
He's joining hundreds of people at a service in Wells Cathedral on Tuesday afternoon before he visits the Students' Union at Bath Spa University on Wednesday to speak on the theme "Faith: Good, bad or indifferent?"
Speaking on Premier's News Hour Dave Landrum, from the Evangelical Alliance, said: "Christianity has shaped our British values. We've got a debate about British values at the moment; well, you can't really disassociate British values from the Bible. We've had millenia of the Bible soaking into our culture, and we benefit from that.
"It seems to me that the government wants the good stuff from Christianity but not the God stuff that supplies it, and I don't think you can separate that.
"If I was being cynical I would also say that the government seems to be using measures to address legitimate concerns about terrorism to enforce a new social orthodoxy that is at odds with Orthodox Christianity, and if anything is extremist, that is extremist - and it must be resisted."
Listen to Premier's Hannah Tooley speaking to Dave Landrum on the News Hour: