Like our recent prime minister, German federal chancellor Angela Merkel is a child of the manse but, unlike him, she is willing to bat for the public benefits of Christianity – as of course befits the leader of Europe’s largest Christian Democratic party, the CDU.

In Munich last month, following in the footsteps of federal president Horst Kohler, she beat a path to the Ecumenical Kirchentag (church congress) where 50,000 Christians from all major Gernam denominations heard her clearly re-affirm that Christianity is the main foundation of that country’s value system.

Alan Wilson reported in the Guardian about Kohler’s robust pull-your-socks-up call to the ecclesiastical leaders attending the Kirchentag – ‘power speaking truth to church’ Wilson dubbed it (here).

(Incidentally, Wilson writes an informative article – but why does he underplay Christianity on this side of the Channel? He states twice that the 55,000 attendees at Munich are about 20 times the numbers of those at the largest Christian gathering in England. Really? Just 2,750 people?

Here in Newham 30,000 Christians meet twice a year at the ExCel Centre for an all-night ‘Festival of Life’ (here) .

Also in Newham this coming weekend, Christians from across London and the denominations will meet at West Ham United FC in Upton Park for the annual Global Day of Prayer (here). If the last GDOP at West Ham in 2007 is anything to go by, there will be up to 15,000 Christians in the stadium on Sunday afternoon.

At the end of July my family will attend New Wine (here) for a week of Christian worship, teaching and fellowship – together with over 10,000 other believers.

There are many more examples. In its heyday before the development of the Olympic complex claimed its premises in 2007, Hackney-based Kingsway international Christian Centre (here) had 12,000 worshippers in its 4,000-capacity building every Sunday. So although Wilson is (a) a C of E bishop and (b) writing for the Guardian, surely these are inadequate excuses for him being so out-of-touch with on-the-ground Christian reality.)

But while Kohler’s robust comments rightly grabbed the headlines, Merkel’s were important too. “Our society lives on premises that it cannot create by itself,” she reminded the Christian audience, a statement which commentators recognise as based on the dictum of German legal philosopher Ernst-Wolfgang Bockenforde, that “the liberal secular state is based on normative premises that it cannot itself guarantee”.

Basically the argument is that only religion – Christianity – can create the ethical basis that modern secular societies depend upon to function. “On the one hand (the liberal secular state) can subsist only if the freedom it consents to its citizens is regulated from within, inside the moral substance of the individuals and of a homogeneous society,” wrote Bockenforde in his ‘Staat, Gesellschaft, Freiheit’ (here). “On the other it is not able to guarantee these forces of inner regulation by itself without renouncing its liberalism.”

Exactly! Our democratic freedoms depend on their Christian undergirdings, and as the latter are eroded from public life so inevitably the former shrink too. The direct consequence is our burgeoning and increasingly illiberal nanny state where Big Sister knows best and replaces God; citizens are handbagged into line by progressively more intrusive laws, bureaucratic regulations and diktats from Brussels as well as Whitehall; fear and caution replace faith and optimism in public discourse; and, for example, freely consenting adult smokers are no longer allowed to get together to form a smoking club! The vital organs of our mature democracy – such as freedom of association – are being closed down. Liberalism is being renounced.

Regrettably despite his much-vaunted churchgoing, I don’t see David Cameron following Angela Merkel with a reminder of the necessity of Christianity for the health of our democracy.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 at 5:30 pm and is filed under Christianity, Democracy, Religious/Politics, World Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.