This faith brings us a discipleship, which brings a self-control and many forms of (public) service. The country lives at second-hand on this self-control and service. The country lives from the virtue it has received, over many centuries, from Christians. It enjoys the rule of law because Christians learned and demonstrated how to live together under the discipleship of the Church. All the education, health and social care that together have formed our welfare state are derived from centuries of love and service of Christians to those around them. All the forms of national public service have been built up by this Christian service to neighbour and neighbourhood. Without it we would constantly be pushing against each other, and the unhealed sources of friction would make us a society of constant rivalries, sectarianism, violence and totalitarianism. It would be a society of feud and retaliation, and consequent poverty and lack of aspiration, just as static as every other culture untouched by the gospel.
The presence and (comparatively) well-ordered lives of Christians are constantly healing wounds that would otherwise stay open and fester. The country lives on the moral credit of the few accumulated over many generations.
The nation owes its existence and its ongoing vitality to the continuing supply of this love that produces this public witness and public service, and the discipleship which produces this self-control so we accept the restraints on our action and live with one another as in mutual respect as a law-abiding society.
Christianity forms us as citizens and members of the nation. Without Christianity, people don’t take on political responsibility, and become fully citizens able to commit themselves to an open mutual accountable form of life. They separate into two classes, one of the managers and controllers, and another of those who are managed and controlled, who are dominated and passive, who have never learned to express themselves, or to express themselves in any other form than discontent and occasional dangerous outburst of anger.
It is Christianity percolating over many centuries into every relationship that makes a society of people content to recognise each other as equals under the law and so as members of a shared political community. Only Christianity makes a nation. The Christian political and moral culture that spread from European nations around the world sustains the present worldwide modern regime. But that political unity and culture, and the modern world, are entirely dependent on being renewed by the same gospel that brought them into existence in the first place. Without renewal from the gospel and the political culture which it produces, the present world will break up and disappear.
