John Milbank, at the ABC (that’s the Australian Broadcasting Corp.) Religion and Ethics page:
Given the evidence that atheism itself can become a political program and seek to enact nihilism with dire results, should we not be worried about the gradual drift of the Labour party towards atheism, despite the genuine – though varied – pieties of both Blair and Brown?
I would go further, and suggest that this drift towards atheism keeps exact pace with a retreat from any genuine radicalism. The party of R.H. Tawney, the party shaped by Methodism, by Anglo-Catholic socialism and the legacy of British philosophical Idealism, was a party that sought to create an entirely ethical market, whether through State intervention or (in my view more promisingly) through mutualist association.
But the largely secular party we have today essentially agrees with the Right about the inevitably amoral character of the market, a view that is increasingly backed-up by new modes of social Darwinism.
Hence, perhaps, the current investment in Christianity among radical political theorists and philosophers (e.g., Žižek and Badiou) that Matthew Engelke and Joel Robbins bring up in their introduction to our discussion of Global Christianity, Global Critique.
Continue reading Milbank’s article here.