Russia, India and China are having to deal with Islamism within their own borders but increasingly they will also have to engage with it as it affects their international trade and political relationships. As far as the West is concerned, whilst respecting a proper distinction between Church and State, it is hugely important for it to acknowledge that its value-system is derived from a Judaeo-Christian worldview. Belief in inherent human dignity or equality based on the common origin of all human beings or liberty as a fundamental right is not arbitrary enlightenment dogma in an irrational world but springs precisely from a cosmos continually being ordered, directed, renewed and redeemed by its Creator. It is not enough for us just to hold these values but, taking account of the challenge from aggressive secularism and radical Islam, to be able to give an account of their origin and importance. Politically correct secularism tends to collapse all of these fundamentals into one mega-value of non-discrimination and extends it beyond how persons are to be treated to equal regard for all kinds of attitudes, behaviours and lifestyles.

Because there is little in common to offer that is absolute, it has produced doctrines like that of multiculturalism which are content to settle for different religious and ethnic communities to lead their own lives, more or less separately from each other.  The business of the state is thus seen not as one of integrating diversity but as providing for separateness in the use of language, housing and education. Such secularism has a strong individualistic focus and concentrates on the safeguarding of individuals but is weak on the need also to uphold vital social institutions, such as the family. This can lead to the view that everyone who shares a fridge is family, ignoring the importance of what Brenda Almond has called the biological connections so important for nurture, self-awareness and the ability to establish balanced relationships.

At the very time that research is showing us the distinctive way in which children relate to fathers and mothers, there is a determined attempt not only to write marriage out of the picture but fathers as well. Moral relativism has also tended to water down the respect society owes to the person at the earliest stages of life, allowing the embryo to be manipulated, discarded and destroyed in the name of scientific research or a eugenicist view of what sort of children it is desirable to have with, no doubt, the gradual elimination of the disabled, those disposed to serious illness later in life or just the weak and the unpretty. At the other end of the lifespan, again, at the very time that pain caused by terminal disease can be managed (thanks to the Christian-based hospice movement), we are witnessing an obsessional campaign to make euthanasia and/or assisted suicide legal, even though the dangers of abuse, of the elderly and the ill feeling unwanted, and of the deterioration in palliative care provision are well known. 

In all of this, we are asked to accept an allegedly value-free system of education. On closer inspection, however, it is found not to be value-free at all but riddled with unexamined secularist assumptions about the world and ourselves which shapes pupils' attitudes towards others, a sense of purpose in life and respect for the environment just as much as any religious worldview does. The acknowledgement of the Judaeo-Christian tradition as central to the survival of the West is not necessarily to privilege any particular church or ecclesiastical tradition.