Having reviewed the 10 Commandments and two New Testament ones, which underlie British moral teaching over the ages, it is imperative that we seek to match contemporary need with the contemporary answer, in contemporary language!

Here we suggest four primary needs and four primary values that respond to those needs.

1            An antidote to materialism.  The ‘must-have’ tenets of materialism are pushed and stressed so loudly that our society needs a clear and robust ethic to help us resist what is, ultimately, to our detriment and against our real wishes.  To prove the point, an April 2005 Populus opinion survey of 1000 people asked them to rank eight aspects of life in order of importance.  Not a single respondent ranked “belongings” first; only two (two out of one thousand – 0.2%) said “money”.  No less than 855 (85%) put “family” first, with nothing else scoring above 6% (and that was “quality of life”).

Our suggested expression of the key value we need is that “People are more important than things”. This captures something of the anti-materialistic ethic of “Don’t covet” and “Remember the Sabbath Day”, has an indirect but real relationship with “don’t steal”, and strongly echoes “love each other” and “forgive one-another”.   To listen to the culture of today, we could easily become convinced that things are more important than people.  That the reverse is true, and obviously true, now needs to be stressed, loud and clear.

2.            An antidote to violence and selfishness.   Nastiness and cruelty are not exactly applauded in our society, but they are constantly put before our eyes, increasingly often without censure.  Given that we learn (as children and even as adults) from the behavior of others, which we unconsciously copy, we have developed clear “role models” in this direction, often without meaning to.  According to these role models, anger is to be expressed, respect is to be gained through violence and cruelty is normal.  The result has been a growing ‘mood’ of nastiness, which combines with the selfishness of materialism, to produce a sense that “nobody cares a toss for anybody else”.    Which is, of course, the opposite of community.

Our suggested expression of the key value we need is “We should all serve the needs of others”. It anticipates “don’t steal” and “don’t kill”, while capturing the essence of “love each other” and, indeed, “forgive one-another”, in a practical way.  A spirit of service is what our society is crying out for.  We must make ‘doing good’ fashionable again.

3.            An antidote to the breakdown of the family.  Two cultural factors strongly  militate against the family, and feed the epidemic of family breakdown.  The first is that marriage has been made to look ‘un-cool’, with free-flow ways of living being presented as being more modern and somehow more impressive.  (“We don’t need an old-fashioned and restrictive institution or a ‘piece of paper’ to tell us we love each other”).  Yet, seeing their parents split up is five times more likely amongst the children of unmarried parents as compared to the children married ones.  The second is, whether married or not, our culture that shouts about self-fulfillment but hardly mentions the need for commitment in the face of difficulty.   In fact, opinion is still on the side of commitment.  Thus, in the opinion poll of 1,000 people cited above, 86% said they would regard “cheating on your partner as a sin” (Populus, April 2005).   But our culture so de-emphasizes commitment, that couples needing to work things out during a rough time are also having to resist a culture that says “do what feels good to you, now”.

Our suggested expression of the key value we need is “Commitment is the bedrock of family life”.  This, of course, picks up on “don’t commit adultery” and places marriage, once again, as a key value simply because it is the public declaration of, and framework for, commitment.  Stability will only be regained in a society that is prepared once again to emphasize commitment, including that of parents to children and children to parents.

4.            An antidote to insincerity.  Truth was once a foundational value, but it has to a large extent been sidelined by a mixture of convenience (being relaxed about the ‘white lie’), and the wholesale emphasis on image (which often has no bearing whatsoever on the truth).   This has given rise to a society which is characterised by insincerity of every kind.  An email may well be a ‘scam’, out to deceive you; a product in lavish packaging may fall apart on day one; a piece of political ‘spin’ will give a false impression of the truth without directly saying so; an advertisement will display a beguiling but irrelevant image – for example, the beautiful girl in the perfume advertisement, who is there to give you the impression that, if you use the same perfume as her, you will somehow look like her; and that she loves the perfume, whereas she is merely an actress paid to pretend to love it!  All this is insidious and yet totally pervasive.  Falsity is the new currency of our society.  It breeds shallowness and an endemic loss of integrity and trust at all levels.

Our suggested expression of the key value we need is “Truth is the foundation of trust”.  It covers “don’t bear false witness” and also “love each other”.  Most of all, it is what we need in our culture to defend us against a growing culture of distortion and manipulation, which seems to know no bounds.

The key question then arises: how can we apply these values – how can we make them count in today’s Britain?  We seek to address this in How do we apply our values?