Faith in Britain

that world he said Christians were moving away from 'fortress church' and had recaptured something which we had lost by embarking on their pilgrimage. He trenchantly attacked the New Right for their 'fundamental contempt for community'. I strongly agree with this view. The New Right see any clinging to community as atavistic, looking back to a lost past. They have failed to understand that when you destroy community or family - the basic community - you destroy faith. Linden also said that a reliance on the market economy alone was unChristian, because of the disunity it creates. He contrasted this disunity with the unity of the Trinity, 'which suggests love and equality'. As Christians we cannot remain morally neutral when we come into contact with either the liberal/capitalist structure or Marxist-Leninism.

In his search for a third way, the Christian economist and sociologist, Dr Alan Storkey, presented a paper entitled 'A Christian Programme for a Political Party' and argued strongly for the creation of a political party which was unashamedly Christian in outlook and approach. He warned that 'Christians can mess up politics as well as the next'; that denominational battles had queered the Churches' view of politics; that Christianity can be used by parties; and that since the seventeenth century Christians have retreated into issue related politics, accepting a sacredsecular split and a subjectivism where they do not allow themselves to think and speak as Christians. He considered the nature of political parties and contended that all parties are groups which share convictions, with free membership and no coercion to join. A Christian-based party would be a community of political faithful with shared principles, priorities, practice and evaluation. All parties which exist in the UK at present are analogous: 'predominantly they are humanist.' He said it was not problematic for Christians to be explicit about their faith, so long as they admitted their fallibility, and that their political obedience is to Christ, their leader.

The Jubilee Centre's ideas on Christian relationism were contained in Dr Michael Schluter's address, 'A Political Agenda based on Judaeo-Christian Values'. Dr Schluter said that Evangelical and Catholic social teaching had been converging but this new concern for politics 'has yet to find expression in an agreed consensus among the churches on the principles which should inform the church's approach to the political order'. He said his talk would focus 'specifically on the case for a political party based on Christian principles, and on the platform which such a party might adopt'. In words which were echoed by a number of speakers he recognised that 'to argue for such a party is not to belittle the role of Christians in other political parties, or to suggest that their stance is un-Christian. Almost any political party in any political era will have positive and negative characteristics from a Christian perspective.' However, he said, 'in an age increasingly overwhelmed with material concerns, there is, we believe, a strong case for examining the ideals of a Christian framework for society, and the implications of such ideals for economic and social policy'. Schluter contended that