The first Annual Theos lecture made the front page of the Star. It wasn’t intended to and, so vile was the coverage, that everyone concerned wished it hadn’t (the headline was about “Muslims” – what else?).

Our public debates today are hardly free of sensationalist coverage and headlines about “Islam” or “religion”, but the feeling (at least at Theos) is that the atmosphere around religion in public life has changed. Having once, during those heady days when the New Atheists captured every thought and made it obedient to Darwin, been solely about whether religion was simply too ineradicably stupid, evil and dangerous to be let out alone in public, today the debate feels more sophisticated, and more interesting.

The seventh Annual lecture, delivered by Will Hutton at Stationer’s Hall in the City of London last night, with responses from Jon Cruddas and David Willetts, and brilliantly chaired by Sarah Montague, won’t get on the front page of the Star, for which we give thanks. It did, however, feed the hungry debate about what role religion – specifically Christianity, and more specifically Catholic Social Teaching – should play in public life.

Jon Cruddas argued that it was in this nexus between faith, particularly as it is embodied in local neighbourhoods, and politics, about which so many people are so disaffected, that the really exciting action is happening (a good example of this is David Barclay’s Theos report on Making Multiculturalism Work). David Willetts sounded a note of caution, arguing that making confessionally-grounded arguments in a plural society is highly problematic (maybe worth reading Jonathan Chaplin’s brilliant Talking God for this). But it was Will Hutton’s contribution that was most intriguing.

He spoke about how most of his professional life had been spent occupying a narrow isthmus, between capitalism, the most recent incarnation of which he has been highly critical, and socialism, in which he was never a believer. Nor, of course, was or is he a Christian believer, which made his encounter with Catholic Social Teaching all the more curious.

It happened by accident, the need to waste some time, in a bookshop in Rome. The result was a bizarre sense of familiarity. Here were arguments – in support of a chastened capitalism which prioritises people over capital, the essential dignity of work, the importance of intermediary institutions between state, market and individual – that Hutton had been making for years. And from the Catholic Church?!!

The sense of surprise was palpable, partly because media coverage had led him (and I daresay many others) to believe that Catholic teaching extended only to issues of sex and death but also perhaps because Catholic Social Teaching is a tradition, and traditions are…well, traditional.

The popular conviction is that traditions are static, ossified, dictatorial, and indeed they can be. But they need not be. And there is sound logic to the idea that if a tradition has been reflecting on an issue for 125 year, as CST now has, and if that has been a living reflection – inspecting, reacting, accumulating, and modifying – then it is quite likely to have something to recommend it. CST has, and our hope is that events like this year’s annual lecture, and Just Money, the report to which it was tied, will help more people recognise that.

The three way discussion between Hutton, Cruddas and Willets solved nothing. Discussions rarely do. But it did confirm the impression that having the endured the game of ecclesiastical whack-a-mole, in which religious figures brave enough to pop up in public life were rapidly thwacked back into their hole, we may now be seeing other, non-religious, figures peek over edge and join them.

Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos

Image from www.flickr.com under the Creative Commons Licence.