Those of us who came of age in the 1990s felt as if we were living in what Francis Fukuyama described as the ‘End of History’. All the great political struggles were in the past. Western liberal-democracy, with varying degrees of mixed social-market economy, was triumphant. We – the ‘Free West’ – had defeated fascism and communism, both materially and morally. Of course, there was a little mopping-up to do – in the Balkans, for example, or in China – but, on the whole, we all looked forward with confident joy to a millennium of peace and plenty, with freedom, democracy, Coca-Cola and blue jeans for all nations. The political future belonged to bland smiling centrists, offering good technocratic management within the shared paradigm of a liberal society which had already solved all fundamental questions.

That consensus, and the blithe political optimism that went with it, has since been thrice shattered: first, by the World Trade Centre attacks on 11 September 2001; second, by the financial crisis of 2008; and third, by the EU referendum of 2016. The effect of those three shocks was cumulative.
The first shock led to the ‘forever wars’ in Afghanistan and Iraq. Needlessly expending blood and treasure on a misguided mission to establish liberal-democracy on places sociologically and culturally unprepared to receive it forced us to question the universality of liberal-democratic values. Were these values really ‘self-evident’, as the US Declaration of Independence proclaims them to be? Or were they the contingent product of Western societies shaped, over many slow and erring centuries, by the ethical and intellectual influence of Christianity? It reminded us that the ‘clash of civilisations’ that raged at Lepanto and Vienna’s Gates was still far from settled. History was back with vengeance.
The second shock made us question the connection between democracy and general prosperity. In the politically salient popular version of the story, a group of bankers acted recklessly, gave themselves huge bonuses, and ran away to the Cayman Islands, leaving ordinary working people to pick up the bill, in the form of crippling austerity and declining living standards. Unlike the rest of Europe, we have not recovered from the Great Recession. Growth has flatlined, wages stagnated, and living costs have continued to rise.
It is not only the poor who have suffered, although the poor, of course, have suffered most. The grip of austerity is now being felt by previously comfortable middle class families, whose incomes have flatlined since 2008 despite rising living costs (Romei and Peterson, 2022). It is evident too, in the dilapidated state of public services and infrastructure, especially anywhere more than about a hundred miles from London. In other words, the material politics of class struggle, smoothed over during the relative prosperity of the 1990s and 2000s, was back, too.
The third shock – Brexit – is inconceivable without the confluence of both civilisational anxiety, focused on questions of immigration and identity, and economic anger, occasioned by the neglect of regional England and the injustice of an economic model skewed in favour of the oligarchs. The rich and powerful leaders of the Brexit campaign, many of them convinced libertarians, skilfully but misleadingly posed as anti-elitists, in order to mobilise this anxiety and anger and turn it into a concentrated attack on the one institution that actually counter-balanced the power of the Anglo-British ruling class.
The Brexit Revolution failed, of course, both to ease cultural anxieties and to assuage economic anger. This was inevitable. The European Union was not the cause of our woes (if anything, it protected us from their worse effects). Leaving the European Union would not make those woes go away. To this, the Brexiters had no answer, except to insist, like African Maoists faced with economic collapse, that their revolution was not failed, but incomplete(Rogers, 2022). Not content with leaving the European Union, they claimed a mandate to dismantle the whole liberal settlement, of which the European Union was but the pinnacle and exemplar.
The blandly smiling centrist technocrats who had led us through an era of relative prosperity were now portrayed as villains. One tabloid headline even branded judges of the Supreme Court as ‘enemies of the people’ (Slack, 2016). Together, mainstream politicians, judges, civil servants and the media were now labelled as ‘The Blob’: liberal, cosmopolitan, metropolitan, university-educated, Guardian-reading, canape-eating Europhiles, accused of standing in the way of ‘The People’s Will’. Liberalism became a convenient enemy against which to rally the far-right, because there is scarcely anything that cannot be attacked under that label. Europe: liberal. Human Rights Act: liberal. Civil Service: liberal. Judiciary: liberal. BBC: liberal. National Health Service: liberal. King Charles III: liberal. Avocado toast: liberal.
This is not conservatism. It is a dangerous and reactionary inversion of conservatism, which genuine conservatives ought to oppose with all their might. Yet many, including many Christians, have been deceived by this sleight of hand. Certainly, there are varieties of liberalism that should rightly be rejected, especially by those working within a Christian concept of human anthropology. There are forms of liberalism that, in the name of personal autonomy, see no serious ethical qualms with abortion, assisted dying, prostitution, paid surrogacy, the dismantlement of the family as a coherent social unit with functions proper to itself, or the deconstruction of biological sex differences into mere personal identity choices.
Many Christians have also pointed out the dangers of neo-liberalism: the free-market fundamentalism that was championed by Regan and Thatcher, and which has become the dominant economic orthodoxy in the last forty years. In policy terms, neo-liberalism usually means union-busting, austerity, tax cuts for the rich (but not for the poor), privatisation and deregulation, and the rejection of industrial policy and Keynesian counter-cyclical spending. This ideology of oligarchy has been spectacularly effective at preserving and expanding the wealth and power of the rich, at the expense of everyone else.
Neo-liberalism not only produces ethically unjust outcomes. More fundamentally, it is a philosophy that dehumanises people by reducing them to economic abstractions. It turns human beings into ‘human resources’, reducing us to mere self-interested, utility-maximising units of consumption and production. Starting from the assumption that all people are inherently selfish, that our desires are insatiable, and that all human interactions transactional, it posits the rational egoist individual as the sole point of reference (Innes, 2023). The choices of the idealised neo-liberal individual cannot be weighted upon any ethical scale: neo-liberal theory does not acknowledge that some choices are rightly-ordered and conducive to human flourishing, while others are sinful. The only limits permitted upon individual choices are those of economic capacity: what one can afford, in a market place of others also seeking to maximise their own subjective benefit through nominally free (albeit often constrained) actions. If some achieve dominant power over others, such that some can indulge their vanity, pride, lust and greed with abandon, while others are forced by necessity to become objects for the pleasure or profit of others, then so be it.
This is a view of humanity that, in the words of Professor Jeffery Syck, is ‘totally devoid of the noble’ (Syck, 2024). The rational individual of economic textbooks is not an emotionally and spiritually healthy human being, but an amoral monster, enslaved to their desires and ruthlessly manipulating those around them to achieve those desires. Thankfully, most people are not like that. But neo-liberal policies, having begun with that type of person as its normative ideal, try to create the person to fit the ideology. Weaker unions and more precarious employment break down solidarity. A public ideology of ‘greed is good’, and ‘there is no such thing as society’ makes us, by degrees, into greedy and antisocial shells.
Meanwhile, neo-liberalism ignores anything that cannot be quantified or commodified, and does not appear on any balance sheet, even if these things – like public duty, civic spirit, honour, tradition, family, faith, beauty, truth, comradeship, trust, solidarity – are essential to the common good and to human flourishing.
In response to these harmful varieties of liberalism, some thinkers – many of them Christians – have been drawn to the ideas of ‘post-liberalism’. They not only reject the free-market economics of neo-liberalism, but reject philosophical liberalism as a whole, in favour of a more solidaristic, interconnected, understanding of human nature and human flourishing (Blond, 2010; Milbank and Papst, 2016). Over-simplifying, one could say they are calling for less Thomas Hobbes, with his view of life as insatiable competition, and more Aristotle, with his view that humans beings are ‘political animals’, intended for community, who must use their capacities of reason and justice, in order to pursue the good life together.
British (actually, English) post-liberalism has taken up a particular position on the political spectrum: fiscally and economically on the left, and socio-culturally on the right. This ‘Left Conservative’ position seeks both cultural reassurance and economic security. In contrast to post-1979 Thatcherite Conservatives, it is comfortable with a bigger, more pro-active state, more spending on public services and infrastructure, and more solidaristic welfare policies. In contrast to post-1997 Blairite Labour, it is suspicious of modernisation, diversity, and the dissolution of traditional social ethics, morality, and Christian values.
My fear, however, is that the critics of liberalism target their wrath too broadly. The popular outrage at neo-liberalism is in danger of turning into an outrage against liberal-democracy itself, giving rise to reactionary, authoritarian, populist, far-right movements.
Those who think deeply about the theory and practice of democracy have long been concerned with the problem identified by Fareed Zakaria’s in 1997: What if we hold free and fair elections, but people choose to vote for racists, fascists, and other authoritarians? What if our leaders are democratically elected, and genuinely supported by a majority of the people – but routinely ignore constitutional limits on their powers, undermine checks and balances, disregard the rule of law, and violate human rights? (Zakaria, 1997: 22). Zakaria called this ‘illiberal democracy’. We might equally call it authoritarian populism. Or, in classical terms, we should call it tyranny – because ancient tyrants were populist leaders who disregarded the rule of law and institutional checks and balances.
This is the situation we now face. Well-intentioned and quite moderate critiques of liberalism have led, in their popularised form, to an attack on the institutions and norms of liberal-democracy itself. Hatred and scorn have been poured upon Parliament, established political parties, the judiciary, the civil service, the media, the monarchy, the church, the legal profession, the academy, and just about every institutional bulwark of civilised and decent society. No doubt many of these institutions have been corroded by too much of the wrong sort of liberalism. The answer should be to restore and reform. Instead, there are parts of the reactionary right who are willing to burn it all down, wheat and tares together.
We should not be shy of identifying the motives of the radical right. They are, increasingly openly, racist. Their hatred of liberal-democratic institutions stems from the belief that these institutions are systematically targeting ‘native white British people’, and favouring ethnic minorities. Some see the destruction of liberal-democracy as acceptable collateral damage in the establishment of an ethnically homogenous state. We have heard that before. We heard it across Europe in the twentieth century. It does not end in a glorious utopia of healthy buxom Saxon peasants. It ends in death camps and torture chambers.
Some of those on the extreme right have become unashamed of this, openly calling for mass deportation and even genocide. Such views might be those of a minority, but even the fact that they are being openly expressed ought to give us cause for deep, and urgent, concern. Christians in particular, much as we might oppose certain types of liberalism, should be resolute in our opposition to such a violent and destructive reaction. As Christian citizens of a democracy, we have a responsibility to love our neighbours in how we vote and how we engage in public life. Christianity is not a law code or a political programme, and it would be wrong to conflate Christian teachings with any specific party or ideology. Yet there are certain principles of Christian political thought, which, although they have to be interpreted and applied in context, can, should, and do, shape our political engagement.
Faced with these realities, Christians in mid-20th century Europe had to navigate a political dilemma not unlike that which faces us today. When economic liberalism collapsed after the Wall Street Crash, two dominant alternatives arose. The first was a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship of the proletariat, that wanted to crush the human person in the name of vast impersonal historical forces, stripping away faith, family, and any kind of ties to nation or place in the process. The second was that cluster of reactionary attitudes and egregious behaviours that we loosely call fascism.
From this apparent dichotomy arose Christian Democracy: an ideology that was critical of the excessive moral and economic individualism of liberalism, but also equally critical of the authoritarian regimes of the far-left and far-right. Christian Democracy was an ideological synthesis that sought to apply the policies of Christian social teaching in matters of social and economic relations within the context of a liberal-democratic state. Just as Thomas Aquinas had sought to reconcile Aristotle to Christ, so Christian Democracy sought to reconcile Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno with constitutional democracy .[1] It offered a decent and humane, third alternative to both revolution and reaction.

Moreover, Christian Democracy was able to present this in an electorally attractive, ambitious but pragmatic, party platform. Christian Democrats became the dominant ideological stream in many European democracies in the post-war era – including in Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Italy (Hanley, 1996). Christian Democracy did at least as much as Social Democracy to create the welfare state, to bring about universal healthcare, to protect labour rights, and to restrain the abuses of capitalism, without, however, destroying the initiative of private enterprise. It also played a pivotal role in the construction of what was to become the European Union.
The differences between post-liberalism, Christian Democracy, and authoritarian populist reaction (which we might conveniently, and not inaccurately, call ‘fascism’) must be understood. Post-liberalism offers a fusion of the fiscal-economic left and the socio-cultural right, but it does so in a package which is constitutionally conservative. In a British context, it has emphasised the unitary British state, parliamentary sovereignty, and opposition both to domestic constitutional constraints and the constraints imposed by membership of the European Union and the Council of Europe. Authoritarian populist reaction shares – and indeed, amplifies – those majoritarian and nativist tendencies, raising parliamentary sovereignty to a sort of political fetish, and regarding any constraint upon the power of ruling majorities as inherently illegitimate; it weaponises the socio-cultural conservatism of the post-liberal movement as a vote-winner, but – as an essentially oligarchic ideology – it is much more selective and limited in its economic critique of neo-liberalism. Reform UK, for example, is at its core a Thatcherite party, not a party of the post-liberal Conservative Left.
Christian Democracy shares two principles with post-liberalism. First, it is socially and culturally conservative, pro-family and respectful of Christian values. Second, it is fiscally and economically on the moderate centre-left, critical of extreme forms of free market capitalism, and willing to use the state in order to protect people’s economic well-being, not only through relatively generous, family-centred welfare policies, but also through active industrial investment and state-led economic development. However, in contrast to most post-liberals, and all reactionary populists, Christian Democracy has two additional principles. The third principle is that Christian Democracy is pro-European. It is not globalist, nor blind to the calls of nation, region and locality (indeed, regional and local democracy is integral to Christian Democratic constitutional thought), but it is non-racist, and comfortable with the close political unity of European civilisation as the heir to the values of the Christian West. Fourth, Christian Democracy is deeply committed to the constitutional democratic state; it rejects populism and authoritarianism, and is ready to recognise the need for the balance, limitation and decentralisation of public power (Hanley, 1996; Kselman and Buttigieg, 2003).
In this context, the keynote speech by Richard Lucas, leader of the Scottish Family Party, at the latest party conference, is worthy of note . Lucas presents himself as no friend of liberalism, but still seeks to put distance between his party and those of the reactionary right – in particular, rejecting Reform UK’s cynical pitch to ‘Christian values’ while ignoring the full breadth and depth of Christian teaching (Scottish Family Party, 2024). While the Scottish Family Party is not quite squarely in the Christian Democratic tradition, it does – in this respect, at least – present a more principled, and less morally compromising, electoral offering to Christians, compared with populist parties. This is not necessarily to endorse the Scottish Family Party, or any other party: that is not the intent of this article. Rather, it is to cause Christians to think more carefully about what they oppose, politically, and what they endorse. Falling for the faux-Christian window dressing of the reactionary far right is disastrous. A blanket condemnation of ‘liberalism and all its works’, while tempting to many Christians, is at best unhelpful, and at worst positively dangerous.
We live in unsettled times, when certain foundations and fundamentals long taken for granted are no longer secure. The state is facing a chronic crisis of legitimacy, and the sense of economic, cultural and institutional fragility has intensified. Christians, in particular, might look at recent decisions – such as the assisted dying bill, and the threat to freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of assembly caused by buffer-zones around abortion centres – and feel that there is nothing worth preserving. It is almost laughably easy for unscrupulous far-right politicians to tap into these genuine concerns, felt by many Christians, as a means of mobilising a voter base (Schiess, 2023). This trick has been played to exhaustion in the United States, where many Christians have been induced to vote for a man whose whole approach, rhetoric, lifestyle, policies and attitude are grotesquely, cynically, anti-Christian (Gushee, 2023).
Many Christians in the 1930s embraced fascism as a defence against what they saw as the cultural rot of Marxism. Others, wiser and more discerning, recognised the bait-n-switch offered by fascism, and saw that it was always intrinsically anti-Christian. Christian citizens today, living in the aftermath of a cultural revolution in which so many Christian social and moral foundations have apparently been abandoned, should also be wise. We should not allow ourselves to be seduced by the claims of populist authoritarian reaction. The way of hate, violence and tyranny is unchristian, and leads only go misery and ruin.
The solution, rather, is a more nuanced parsing of liberalism, recognising the value of the liberal-democratic state and of an open society in which rights are respected. Instead of being indifferent to democracy, equality and human rights – or even being ashamed of these things – we should value and reaffirm them as the outworking of Christian values in social and political life, going back to Magna Carta (Cox, 2015; Holland, 2020; Scrivener, 2022).
In so doing, we stand with those mid-twentieth century anti-fascist Christian Democrats who recognised that the liberal-democratic state is, in contrast to any authoritarian regime, more congruent with the Christian political mandate to seek the common good, to recognise the inherent dignity and worth of every human being, and to guard against the corruption of power (Wright and Bird, 2024).
This does not necessarily require the formation of a distinct Christian Democratic party. One of the good things about our politics is that there are sincere Christians in public life who pursue their calling in all parties and none. I am sure that Tim Farron, Miriam Cates and Kate Forbes – to pick the three openly Christian politicians who come first to mind – must disagree on much, in terms of their political principles and priorities. In a democratic society, they are free to pursue the common good as they see it through different parties. Yet I hope they can all consider how the insights of the Christian Democratic tradition might refine, enrich, and challenge, their own perspectives. A Conservatism infused with Christian Democratic thought cannot seek only to preserve the wealth, power or privilege of the few, to the exclusion of the claims of the poor or vulnerable. A Liberalism infused with Christian Democratic ideas cannot see people only as isolated individuals, shorn of familial and communal connections and duties. A Socialism infused with Christian Democracy cannot deify the state, nor deny, under claims of historical materialism, the unique personhood, and the inherent rights and dignity of each human. A Nationalism infused with Christian Democracy cannot become exclusionary, nor veer into chauvinism or racism.
Finally, Christians from across the political spectrum, taking the lead from Christian Democracy, should learn to consider fascists of all stripes – whether they wear brown shirts, red baseball caps, or tweed jackets – as a threat to be challenged and defeated, not as allies with whom to make Faustian bargains.
References:
Annett, A. M. (2022) Cathonomics: How Catholic Tradition Can Create a More Just Economy (Georgetown University Press).
Blond, P. (2010) Red Tory: How the Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How to Fix It (Faber & Faber).
Cox, C. (ed.) (2015) Magna Carta Unravelled: The Case for Christian Freedoms Today (Wilberforce Publications).
Gushee, D. P. (2023) Defending Democracy from its Christian Enemies (William B Eerdmans Publishing).
Hanley, D. (1996) Christian Democracy in Europe: A Comparative Perspective (Pinter).
Holland, T. (2019) Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (Basic Books)
Innes, A. (2023) Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail (Cambridge University Press).
Kselman, T. and Buttigieg, J. (2003) European Christian Democracy: Historical Legacies and Comparative Perspectives (Notre Dame University Press).
Milbank, J. and Pabst, A. (2016) The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers).
Rodgers, I. (2022) ‘Why even the Brexiteers are in despair over Brexit’, The New Statesman (22 June 2022).
Romei, V. and Peterson, N. (2022) ‘Low UK income growth leaves families ‘brutally exposed’ to surging inflation’, The Financial Times (4 July 2022).
Schiess, K. (2023) The Ballot and the Bible (Brazos Press).
Scottish Family Party (2024) Richard Lucas speech, SFP Conference 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpecQQb2HCI
Scrivener, G. (2022) The Air We Breathe: How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality (The Good Book Company).
Slack, J. (2016) ‘Enemies of the People’, The Daily Mail (4 November 2016).
Syck, J. T. (2024) Twitter/X post (29 December 2024), https://x.com/tylersyck/status/1873422453630017936
Wright, N. T. and Bird, M. (2024) Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies (Zondervan Academic).
Zakaria, F. (1997) ‘The Rise of Illiberal Democracy’, Foreign Affairs Vol. 76, No. 6 (Nov. – Dec., 1997), pp. 22-43.