It’s more than just City and stock-market panic and it’s more than a bad recession at the bottom of a boom-and-bust economic cycle. We are peering into the abyss. It’s a financial and economic meltdown that we’ve not seen our lifetime.

Like the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami that gathered strength out at sea and took time before it hit land with such destructive effect, this meltdown has been some time coming. And it looks like the dams and dykes hastily erected by the world’s governments by way of multi-billion dollar bail-outs won’t be enough to halt the devastation.

The implications are yet to become clear, except that life certainly won’t be the same again. The world changed seven years ago on 9/11 and it’s changing even more during this autumn of 2008.

We can argue about the cause, and we should grieve over the impact on vulnerable people around the world as social services in the wealthy countries and aid programmes in the third world are slashed and unemployment balloons. Collectively we’re in for a tough time.

But there is one side-benefit. Here in the UK we’ll soon be burying the shallow, secular, and materialistic consensus that’s blighted our decision-makers, opinion-formers and public life over the past 30 years and that’s driven our phony borrow-til-you-bust shop-til-you-drop consumer society and our superficial glossy five-minutes-of-fame celebrity culture.

Encouraged by easy borrowing and lured by relentless media advertising, we’ve chased the illusion that money buys success and conspicuous consumption is the good life, and we’ve recklessly built mountains of personal debt. Now the chickens are coming home to roost big-time.

A political expression of this consensus by Matthew Parris – usually a stimulating and excellent writer – illustrates the point. Towards the end of Tony Blair’s premiership he reflected on the Blair decade in a Times article entitled, “I do love Blair’s Britain” (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article1737544.ece)

It was the high water mark of the liberal consensus and good epitaph for it too.

Having argued that there was truth and a real idea in the stylish phrase “cool Britannia”, Parris wrote “A defining moment (of Blair’s premiership) for me was the union of Elton John and David Furnish.”

So that’s it. In the midst of all the gritty issues (poverty and inequality, NHS and education, global warming and climate chaos, Islamic terrorism and rogue nuclear states) facing Britain’s Labour government through the turn of the century, Parris’ “defining moment” was the celebrity Hello!-glam civil partnership ceremony of the world’s best light entertainer.

Not even Blair’s Iraq war! The sheer superficiality and complacency of Parris’ liberal-luvvy value system speaks volumes about our media elite.

But the consensus is breaking down; it doesn’t of course fit the times we’re living in now or for the foreseeable future. There is a new confusion, anxiety and fearfulness which leads us away from superficiality and complacency and towards a new openness and a questioning of assumptions.

And so, at last, there’s a new social need and opportunity for the church, as it’s faith that drives out fear.

This is of course not a need and opportunity for unfortunate short-term political comment such as that by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York about greedy banker-robbers (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/sep/25/religion.creditcrunch). But rather for the eternal verities of the Gospel of Truth – the Truth which sets people free from their dark pits of fright, panic and powerlessness and into the broad sun- (and Son-) lit uplands of the love of God and neighbour.

Actually, it may be that in the event people will be tempted into the ephemeral floss of New Age religions, or into the demand for submission to the Allah of Islam, or into worshipping the variety of Hindu gods.

But it’s only in Christ that they will find the true rock upon which they can stand and keep their heads and rebuild their lives when everyone else is losing theirs.

The question is, after decades of secular battering, will UK churches regain their nerve and recover their confidence in time to help society in its hour of need?

I’m not a Catholic but I’ve long admired the Vatican’s strong positions on moral and ethical issues. My own party, CPA, borrows much of its political stance and philosophy from Catholic social doctrine.

Three cheers then for two Catholics who have spoken out recently about the dull and self-righteous secular Roundheads that lead our society.

James MacMillan, a composer/conductor currently with the BBC Philharmonic orchestra, launched an in-your-face broadside at the musical elite. His broadside was a worthy successor to the firebrand Scottish socialist politics for which he used to be renowned. According to the Daily Telegraph he “rocked the establishment this week when he lambasted atheistic media, art and government elites for trying to drive religion out of public life and culture.”

He said, “These are people who speak only to themselves and have convinced each other that the rest of the country thinks just like them. They are wrong. The campaigning atheists, as opposed to the live-and-let-live variety, are raising their voices because they recognise that they are losing; the project to establish a narrow secular orthodoxy is failing. A smug ignorance, a gross oversimplification and caricature that serves as an analytical understanding of religion, is the common intellectual currency.”

Wow. Now there’s a man who understands what’s happening – although he didn’t actually name Richard Dawkins. I particularly rate his view that the campaigning atheists recognise they are losing. That’s what we saw over the Royal Society and the creationism-in-schools controversy (see my posts of 15th and especially 20th September).

Certainly – aided by Sarah Palin – creationism is getting more media attention these days. While it’s usually hostile attention, at least it is becoming more fashionable to discuss the issue. Maybe it’s time for me to come out as a creationist…

The other Catholic is Ruth Kelly MP, who has just resigned from Gordon Brown’s cabinet. “It is difficult to be a Christian in politics these days,” she said last week. “The public debate has become more secular and believers are portrayed as a bit odd. That doesn’t reflect the reality in communities where churchgoing and belief is considered normal.”

MacMillan also said that embracing Christianity is “one of the most radical and counter-cultural moves a musician can make.”

And not just musicians, as Ms Kelly would confirm.

So it’s time for more Christian counter-cultural radicals to get into politics in order to shake up the boring Brownite bank managers and bland Blaire babes who decide our future.

Anyone got Sarah Palin’s phone number..?