One can’t help but notice the growing trend of Christian sounding values being thrown into political debate. Earlier this year Vice President JD Vance and Rory Stewart previously of this parish got into a very heated debate on X about how a Christian theology of love should be applied to immigration policy. Bible verses and quotes from Augustine and Aquinas were flying everywhere.

It seemed as if God was very much back in the public square. But then more recently we’ve heard a forceful articulation of the opposite point of view, MPs with quote “undeclared religious beliefs” were urged to keep such opinions out of their politics – public matters should not be influenced by private faith but by secular reason and evidence. Now these are two very different views about whether God should be involved in the public square. Which one of them if any is right?

My response is twofold. Firstly, everyone brings their faith in something into the public square. And secondly, we need Christian faith in the public square.

So let’s take the first. Everyone brings their faith into the public square.

There’s a common misunderstanding that faith in God is for people’s private lives; secular science and reason are for public life. Behind this statement there are several misconceptions. The first is that faith in God is necessarily irrational. I can only speak for Christianity which actually prizes reason and evidence as critically important.

For example the gospel writer John says in chapter 20:31 that he recorded certain words and actions of Jesus Christ as evidence to be investigated, so that people might have a basis upon which to put their faith in him and so have eternal life.

Hence Christianity is an evidence-based faith, a fact that is foundational to many of our great universities. In that way it’s very much like science, although we’re often told that we must choose between God and science. But that isn’t true.

We no more have to choose between God and science as an explanation for the cosmos than we have to choose between Sir Frank Whittle and science as an explanation for the jet engine.

These explanations do not compete or conflict but complement each other. Both are necessary. God is not the same kind of explanation as science is. God is the explanation of why there is a universe at all in which science or indeed politics can be done.

That is why the faith in God of the towering scientific pioneers Galileo, Kepler, Newton and Clark Maxwell did not hinder their science, but was the motor that drove it. Faith in the scientific endeavour and faith in God make excellent companions.

As the late chief Rabbi Lord Sacks puts it, religion and science are two quite different things, and we need them both. Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean. Sensible science, religion and politics all use evidence-based rational argument.

Take the famous example of William Wilberforce and his abolition campaign. The driving force behind it was his Christian conviction, his faith that all human beings were of equal dignity and value because they were made in the image of God. However his campaign would never have succeeded without the amassing of enormous amounts of factual evidence and reasoning about all aspects of the slave trade.

The second misconception is that secular political thinking is based only on reason and science without any faith dimension. This is very confused.

The word faith has two meanings. First, it can be used as a shorthand for religion, the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faith etc. Second, it is a synonym for trust, deriving from the Latin ‘fides’, from which we get fidelity. In this sense secularism puts its faith in science and reason to start with.

Beyond that we all bring into our politics a whole set of beliefs that have been formed by a variety of influences: our family background, our wider social influences, our experiences, our psychology, and yes our religion too.

Each of us has a world view, an underlying framework of beliefs about life’s biggest questions. What is ultimate reality? What does it mean to be human? Is there purpose to our existence?

That worldview influences everything from politics and government to our everyday choices. And this is true whether the worldview is atheistic, Christian, Jewish, Islamic or shaped by another philosophy or tradition. All of us live out of faith in a worldview even if we don’t name it.

Polly Toynbee was spot on when she wrote in the Guardian, “Every day in Parliament fundamentally different worldviews do battle. Politics is all about the clash of moral universes.”

In the latest Theos report you have in your bags this morning Nick Spencer writes that the real difference in the end is not between religious or non-religious arguments for a policy. All arguments are based on faith in a foundational philosophy, which then feeds through to our convictions about the human person our principles, and finally our policy thinking.

The real difference is between good arguments and bad arguments, between those that are more or less coherent, those that deploy better or worse evidence, those that have more or less robust foundations.

All of us, religious or not, are people of faith. And whether explicitly or implicitly we bring our beliefs into the public square with us. Everyone does.

If people of faith are to be kept out of the public square then it will be empty.

Removing God from the public square does not leave it in some kind of neutrality. No, what happens is that doing God is replaced by doing not God, in other words allowing the worldview of atheism to dominate even though we don’t always realise it!

As the public square is a melting pot of all manner of worldviews, belief in God should be there alongside the rest.

But I want to further argue that we need Christian faith in the public square.

These values lead us to oppose slavery, racism, human trafficking, anti-semitism, eugenics, infanticide, misogyny and many other kinds of injustice. But these values are not given us by science. Einstein once said that you can speak of the moral foundations of science, but not of the scientific foundations of morality.

So where do we get these values from? Now that is problematic since much of modern Western secular culture believes that human beings are the products of an impersonal, unguided natural process aimed solely at survival and the replication of our genes. On that account moral codes are purely social constructions to promote that objective.

That leaves us in a universe that came from nothing, is going nowhere and has no ultimate meaning.

Lord Sacks expressed the dramatic reduction of the value of human beings.

When we take this view you and I are no more than a collection of chemicals, a whole lot of selfish genes blindly reproducing themselves into the next generation. All ideals are illusions, all hopes are destined to be destroyed, and life has no meaning whatsoever.

This means that secular western culture does not possess the moral resources to support its high ideals. The 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzche understood the consequences of jettisoning God. He wrote that when one gives up the Christian faith one also loses the foundation of Christian morality. By breaking one main concept out of it he said “Faith in God one breaks the whole.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn blamed the horrors of Stalin’s regime on this very loss: “Men have forgotten God.” Or as a Russian academic once put it to me in Siberia, “We thought we could get rid of God and retain a value for human beings. We were wrong.”

Even Jurgen Habermas, a leading atheist philosopher, recognises that key Western values stem from the Bible. He writes that ideas like human rights, freedom and democracy are the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. Despite secular claims we are still living off the moral inheritance of Christianity.

Everything else, Habermas concludes, is idle post-modern talk, Historian Tom Holland makes a similar point in his book Dominion, Reflecting on the impact of the New

Testament, he writes that almost everything that explains the modern world, concepts like international law and human rights, ultimately don’t go back to Greek philosophers.

They don’t go back to Roman imperialism. They go back to Paul. His letters along with the four Gospels are the most influential, the most impactful, the most revolutionary writings to emerge from the ancient world.

Habermas and Holland therefore, reached the remarkable conclusion that the very values that lie at the heart of all thinking about human beings in western society, whether religious or secular, actually come from the fundamental teaching of the Bible that all men and women are of equal value and dignity, since they’re created in the image of God.

The biblical worldview has played a central role in the rise of the West. Wycliffe’s English Bible in the 14th century and the King James Bible in the 17th made an immense contribution to the English language and culture, to our values and our great civil institutions; for instance this House of Parliament, and incidentally that’s the reason why still today senior politicians are called ministers.

Wycliffe wrote, “The Bible is superior to all human thought. It is from God. It is true. It is the foundation for all society.”

So in the Bible and the Christian faith we do possess a foundation for the public square that secures the values we all hold dear. God is actually in the public square already although often unrecognised.

I also fear what I saw in the German Democratic Republic and Russia during my many visits during the Cold War and afterwards, that public atheism can be an intolerant fundamentalist faith that seeks to exercise rigorous social and intellectual control by cancelling all views except its own.

How then do we avoid religion becoming an instrument of oppression?

And perhaps Pilate speaks for many when he asks “What is truth?” At least he could see that truth cannot be imposed by force. And so he declared Jesus innocent.

But what then is the truth about Jesus’ kingship? The answer came when Jesus was later led out to be crucified at a place called Golgotha. Pilate ordered an inscription to be written and fixed on the cross. It read “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.”

At the heart is this: Christ gave himself for me. In some deep sense He bore the full weight of my sin and guilt on the cross, and God raised him from the dead as the great declaration that he truly is the Son of God. This Christian message is unique.

Jesus competes with no-one, since no-one else offers us what he does. “Truly truly,” he said into a very uncertain world at the time, and he says it again, “the one that hears my word and believes in him that sent me has eternal life, and shall not come into judgment but has passed from death unto life.”