I don’t believe in Christian values. I believe in Jesus Christ

If someone starts talking about Christian values, I have a simple rule: Make two things – my excuses and for the door. Odds on, I’m either speaking to a latterday crusader who would watch with approval as the Royal Navy machine-gunned small boats in the Channel, or a smug Little Englander who equates the Church with comfortable middle-class mores and activities, such as croquet, sherry parties and being Master of Foxhounds.

I don’t believe in Christian values. I do believe, however, in the gospel and in trying to be a disciple. Yes, I see that the historical Judeo-Christian narrative has been the foundation of Western (and a lot of Eastern) civilization, its societies and polities – liberal democracy, education, health services, the primacy of family and our law. But these are objective structures, not values we claim to ourselves.

Values and virtues

I blame St Thomas Aquinas. Around the middle of the 13th century, he edited ancient Greek philosophy into four “cardinal virtues” to develop character and live a Christian life: Prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance. Today, we might call these wisdom (what Aristotle called “the nurse of the virtues”), fairness, moral courage and self-control.

The trouble is that it’s a lot easier to develop a virtuous Christian character if you live in a castle or a big house up the hill than if, like most people, you’re wallowing in plague-ridden mud (to be polite) at the foot of it. Enter, down the ages, Christian social snobbery. Also, as it happens, meritocracy and the gospel of prosperity, in which God rewards the righteous, but that’s another story.

Sticking with so-called Christian values, there arises a danger that they are used to alienate the ‘other’, those who aren’t like us and don’t necessarily subscribe to the virtue ethics of Aristotle and Aquinas.

The danger is currently most apparent in the loaded claim to be a “Christian country”, heard most often from what is unfairly called the politics of the far-right. Unfair because many would argue such commentators are not really right-wing but fascistic. Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain party would “deport millions”, including theoretically and putatively the late Queen’s husband, Prince Philip, because he was born in Greece.

We’re not a tick-box faith. Following Jesus is not about living up to a set of virtues and values

Former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, said in interview last week that “at the furthest extreme you’ve got sheer ethno-nationalism: ‘There is something about this particular blood which is more pleasing to God than others.’ And that, of course, is where you’re deeply in trouble.”

Or possibly, where we’re deeply in trouble. Williams suggested that a claim to Christian faith is an attempt to self-bestow some respectability on Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and the rest.

Williams further suggested that he might have some “awkward questions” for the ethno-pugilist, Tommy Robinson, not least how he might assimilate his Christian faith, as he leads marches under Christian iconography, with “public rhetoric designed to produce hostility and violence.”

That line of inquiry is intriguing. For me, it’s the awkward question the Nazarene asks of the lawyer after the Parable of the Good Samaritan, in which a Levite (well-born family) and a rabbi (the established Church) ignore the mugged and injured Jewish victim by the road, who is ultimately cared for by a despised Samaritan (see Luke 10).

“Who acted as a neighbour?” asks Jesus, awkwardly. “The one who showed mercy,” replies the lawyer. Not much wiggle room there for the likes of Robinson, Farage and Lowe.

For them, our faith is less about showing mercy than casting the first stone, protecting the harvest in our own barns, keeping disciples in our own nation, rather than making disciples of others. These are the very antitheses of Christian values.

The greatest commandment

One could take a back-bearing to discover corresponding theses of mercy, divine-emulating forgiveness, generosity of spirit and name all these and more as Christian values. But they don’t come as recommended values; they flow freely from the summary of the law, to love God and our neighbour as ourselves (see Mark 12:30-31). So, they’re commandments, not values, or even virtues.

I’m far from sure that Christian ethno-nationalists begin to grasp that. Admittedly, it’s hard to know what that first commandment to “love God” is about. But we can know that it doesn’t mean to hate Muslims, Jews, or anyone who doesn’t share our nationality.

I love it when someone catches themselves saying something and exclaims: “Oh, that’s very unChristian of me!” We’re not a tick-box faith. Following Jesus is not about living up to a set of virtues and values. We’re a mess, we’re failures and we go again, as loved and forgiven people of infinite worth.

So, no, I don’t want to live in a country that claims it’s built on Christian values. I want to live among a people who value Christianity for what it truly is.