I want to make the argument that, not only do religious people have a right to engage in the political process but that, without religious people involved in politics, without the religious dimension being accepted as legitimate, the political process itself breaks down and inevitably corrupts. I want to make that argument by talking about ‘the transcendent’.

So what is ‘the transcendent’? Well, for my purposes here, I want to describe it simply as ‘that to which we are accountable’. In Christian terms, obviously, it is God, but the core understanding is in common across the different religious traditions. In all of them there is a sense that there is a higher authority than any person’s own particular judgement, and that the path of spiritual growth, of personal maturity, lies in learning to conform the individual will to that transcendence.

Where there is no such accountability – where there is no such sense of the transcendent – then there are no external brakes or restraints on the exercise of individual will. The political conversation devolves into a simple struggle for power, and whoever swings the biggest gun wins. This, it seems to me, accurately describes our existing political arrangements. We suffer from being governed by a class that, collectively, does not acknowledge any wider accountability. That is clearly not the case on an individual level – there are many religious people who exercise political authority – rather, it is a point about the cultural assumptions that dominate the political discourse as a whole. To bring this out dramatically, we only need to consider Alastair Campbell’s infamous ‘we don’t do God’ comment. We don’t do God; we don’t do the transcendent.

Why does there need to be such accountability? Surely I am not not arguing that those who accept the transcendent are somehow ‘better’ or ‘more virtuous’ than those who don’t? At an individual level, no. This is a red herring. Any one individual person may be more or less ethical and righteous, capable of acting honourably and without fear or favour. It is perfectly possible for the language of the transcendent to become empty, a way of disguising all sorts of internal horrors. Jesus said of the Pharisees that they were whitewashed tombs – the language of the transcendent was there, but the internal character that such language was supposed to reflect was markedly absent.

What I am wanting to focus on is the nature of the broader culture within which individuals operate. I believe that one sort of culture – one which acknowledges a role for the transcendent – allows for a different sort of political discourse, and a better sort, than one that does not. Take the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. People of good will can disagree on the merits of that particular decision, but was our dialogue helped or hindered by the absence of ‘doing God’? After all, the salient feature of our foreign policy environment since 9/11 is surely that we need to find a way to engage with and overcome those who ‘do God’ in a particularly virulent fashion. Is it possible to work out a way of engaging with Islamist terror without having a conversation about how and why such religious based terrorism is wrong? And can it be done without coming up with some alternative sense of the transcendent to set against that of the terrorists? I don’t believe so. After all, a specific part of the Islamist critique of our society, which they see as corrupt, soft and decadent, is precisely this loss of any sense of the transcendent, any sense that there is a higher authority than our own choices. They see this as a weakness, and they are emboldened by it.

What a sense of the transcendent allows for is the cultivation of a proper humility within our political culture, a sense that ‘we might be very wrong about this’. This is what seems to me to be most lacking. Our political culture seems to run on a tacit acceptance that the political contest is simply about different varieties of bureaucratic managerialism – a ‘we will run the business better than that lot’ sort of argument. So the political debates become ones about marginal efficiency, and the capacity to raise our long term growth rate by half a percentage point. The environment in which we now live – where there are existential questions for our nation to address, including the challenge of Islamist terrorism, the financial bankruptcy of our institutions, the exhaustion of natural resources – these are not challenges that can be met by managerialism!

Why is humility important? Humility is not self-abasement, it is not about being “ever so ‘umble”. It is about having a true recognition of our place in the world, of our own position and capacity – no more and no less. The language links with that of ‘humus’, that is, the earth. Those who are humble are earthed, they are well grounded in reality. In other words, those who are humble have, by definition, a more accurate understanding of the way that the world works. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. They are, therefore, as a direct consequence, better able to make good decisions, decisions that are more likely to have the intended effect. Those who lack humility are those who are misled about their place in the world; they therefore have a distorted understanding of reality; and they therefore make decisions accordingly.

A political culture which lacks a sense of the transcendent, therefore, lacks this capacity for humility. It will inevitably over-reach itself. It will believe that it has a greater capacity for influencing events than is the truth, and this will lead to increasingly dire consequences. For examples of this, simply read our devilish press. The political actors within such a system do what is right in their own eyes, and the nihilist zombies lead the lemmings over the cliff. Yes, lots of mixed metaphors there, but I’m sure you get the gist.