The quick answer is “no” in the short term – and, the evidence suggests, a clear “yes” in the long term.

Clearly, many people of all faiths and none live by values they hold dear and we hope and trust that people of all faiths and none will be part of Uturn UK.  But there is an analysis we want to put forward, which we hope will persuade people – again, of all faiths and none – that the Christian roots of British values are not to be discarded.

A foundation for significance

First, if our historic values are a focus for unity (because we have all be brought up, to a greater or lesser extent, under their influence), then it also has to be said that the same goes for Christianity.  Whether people actively believe or not, the Christian tradition is inseparable from who we are as a nation.  Christianity not only produced a set of values that still provide our inner homing devices (a sense that unkindness is wrong, leadership is about serving, integrity matters – and so on); it also produced a foundation for significance: the sense that these things matter, that there is such a thing as right and wrong, and that we will not succumb to a doctrine of meaninglessness.   That is why there has been such an explosion of feeling about MPs’ expenses, bankers’ bonuses and the rest – because there is a background of conviction that we should behave in a certain way and that gross violation of these values is not just an academic or technical matter (simply that we don’t agree with what they did) but a profound matter of innate justice.  Justice has a much deeper resonance than a mere set of rules.  It calls out to something – it responds to something – which is unseen, but which arouses passion in all of us.

The courage of our convictions

Second, if values are to exert a brake on what we do, they will have to carry some clout.  Otherwise, when the conflict comes between someone’s values and their self interest, self interest may win all to often.

We have that problem with our children.  They have strong desires and those desires, if they are to be balanced by a sense of right and wrong, must be set against something more powerful than “that’s not the way we do things here”.  If a civilization is judged by how successful it is at passing on its values to its children, then we have to own up to a major failure.  The reason for the failure is that we lost the courage of our convictions.  This happened because our convictions became separated from their spiritual roots.

Look, no teeth!

Third, the process of self interest constantly winning out will produce a society in which it is clear that values have no teeth, that they are not to be taken seriously – and even that they have no ‘status’ anymore and so we can follow our self interest with society’s approval; we can shaft whoever we want and no-one will mind.

Which sounds a bit like a history of the last 50 years.  Commercial interests have made a lot of money out of promoting self interest (get what you want, thiswill make you happy, live for you – see Driven by money?) and a fading value system has been powerless to exert a brake on this new culture of selfishness.  Values have been swept aside, made increasingly powerless, because they increasingly lacked the backbone that comes from faith.  We do not mean here just personal faith (which is indeed present in millions of people in today’s Britain); we mean a Christian framework of understanding at the national level, which would inform and reinforce our national values.

Whether Christianity can again take its place in the nation as the foundation for our values we discuss in Christianity in Britain today.  For the moment, it is enough to recognize that faith always used to support values – gave them backbone; at the public level it has almost completely ceased to do so; as the tide of faith has receded, it has left a rather forlorn set of values washed up on the beach, unsupported and un-nourished, increasingly dry and lifeless – more like debris from the past than a guiding star for the future.

And yet we need the guiding star more than ever.

Next: Christianity in Britain today