Thomas Aquinas and Joseph Butler tell a better story than Hobbes. They can account for the various data of the springs of human motivation without having to force them onto a procrustean bed of materialism. What is more, their story gladly embraces the notions of human dignity and rights that most materialists strive to retain in schizophrenic defiance of all their premises. This is why Jürgen Habermas, the eminent (and atheist) German public intellectual, was moved to confess to Le Monde some years ago that religious traditions — not least the Christian one — "have the distinction of a superior capacity for articulating our [liberal, humanist] moral sensibility".
There is considerably more mileage left in the Christian moral vision than Mr Willetts is wont to suppose. And there is evidence that it continues to attract more widespread public support than he thinks. In a BBC poll in 2009 those agreeing that "religion has an important role to play in public life" amounted to 62 per cent, a figure that rose, remarkably, to 77 per cent among 18-24-year-olds. For sure, "religion" in Britain no longer means Christianity only, but it persists in meaning it predominantly.
How long the Christian vision will continue to command social authority, however, depends on two things. It hangs, first, on the success of the Christian churches in raising their moral heads above the tired controversies over sexual ethics, and in persuading the national media to follow them.
But second, it depends on whether or not our ruling elites — presently the counter-cultural children of the Sixties — manage to break the Hobbesian spell, trust the appearance of spiritual goods, and recognise that their authority is the very mother — and not the enemy — of significant human freedom. Certainly, moral authority does not bear down on us from arbitrary skyhooks. Rather, it emanates from goods given in the nature of things and recognised by beings that nature evolves. Evidently, some of these goods are non-material. In which case, curiously, it seems that nature contains the germ of spirit. Were this to be acknowledged by those with the power and responsibility to set the terms of common sense and public discourse, the ethical vitality that remains in (Christian) religion would become more readily visible to the rest of us.
