I’m not suggesting that without Christian belief you can’t have these commitments. My point is that, now more than ever, we need to be able in the political and economic context to spell out what our commitments are and why, what kind of human character we want to see. Politics left to managers, and economics left to brokers add up to a recipe for social and environmental chaos, and threaten the possibilities for full humanity. To resist, we need vision; and whether we are religious or not, we need all the resources available for strengthening and deepening that vision.
It necessitates the cultivation of virtue, a word that is hard for many to take seriously. But it’s high time we reclaimed it. We have no other way of talking about the qualities of human behaviour that make us more than reactive and self-protective ”“ courage, foresight, self-critical awareness and concern for balanced universal welfare, which, under various names, have been part of the vocabulary of European ethics for 2,500 years.
If you were able to convey the great commandment without secular society knowing that it was biblical, I am quite certain that everyone would be in agreement that would be the banner for which we could build society. Try as it might, governments will never be able to enact this into law.