Choosing for oneself

Picturing a three-year-old child apparently pleading for independence from a religious upbringing, "let me grow up and choose for myself" is the final thought of Ariane Sherine's atheist poster campaign. But hang on a minute. Do three-year-old children really have a view about secular freedom? Of course not. This is an adult's agenda placed into the mouth of a child; a perfect example of the very thing about which it complains.

But I digress. This is supposed to be a piece about Phillip Blond's Tory thinktank, ResPublica. But I can't resist opening with Sherine's campaign because its folksy wisdom captures precisely the sort of secular Thatcherism that ResPublica has set itself up to challenge.

In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher made choice the cornerstone of a political world view. Challenging the idea that the nanny state knows best, she emphasised individual choice over collective decision-making. Sherine's campaign is Thatcher's liberalism given an atheist makeover. The individual's freedom to choose has become the supreme value – neither the state, nor society, nor the family must trespass on so sacred a territory.

It seems extraordinary that with the launch of ResPublica, and David Cameron's very public backing, the fightback against the pervasive influence of Thatcher's radical choice-centred liberalism has been mounted from deep within the Tory party. Less extraordinary when one recalls that, for all her Tory fans, Thatcher was always more of a 19th-century liberal. And here is the source of the trouble. For, with choice-centered liberalism, no moral authority is recognised other than the one which springs unbidden from an individual will. The "let me choose for myself" philosophy has eaten away at our sense that we as a country are shaped by a collection of common values. And Blond sees it as his mission to recall the Tory party to "the restoration and creation of human association, and the elevation of society and the people who form it to their proper central and sovereign station".

If this is to be the new Tory credo they will win new friends within the churches. For churches – and indeed mosques and synagogues – have a long record of standing up for strong cohesive communities and against the market-obsessed liberalism that has torn communities apart and evacuated our moral geography of any value but choice.

In Christian circles, all this chimes with the most influential thinker on community in recent years, Alasdair MacIntyre. As Thatcherism was taking root he wrote: "What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us … We are waiting … for another – doubtless very different – St Benedict." Benedict was the founder of small-scale community organising, rooted in the local, morally self-aware, practical and hospitable, driven by a shared vision of the common good. Blond is no St Benedict. But when he speaks of "the associative society", this is pretty much what he means.

For when MacIntyre wrote fearfully about the "dark ages", he was anticipating the consequences of Thatcher's infamous denial that there is such a thing as society. Although Thatcherism intended a moral revival in personal responsibility, the effect of her revolution was to sever the connection with the values that a society passes on through its cultural DNA. Its consequence was a weakening of the very foundations of how we make mature moral judgments.

Society is not just an aggregation of individuals who simply choose to come together for some agreed purpose. The individual is necessarily formed by tradition, society and family – by the res publica. The values they impart provide us with a background against which moral decision-making is made possible. Yet this is the background that Thatcher's liberalism sets out to wipe away.

Here, then, is the significance of child-rearing as a political metaphor. Of course Sherine is right to complain about religious brainwashing. But it is nonsense to pretend one can leave children alone until they can choose their values for themselves. Would anyone refuse to teach a child to speak a language for fear that it might prejudice the way they looked at the world? Indeed, in the absence of any horizon of significance, how would such a desperate creature be ever be in a position to make sense of such a choice? Providing a child with a default world view does not limit their choices. Actually, it is the only way that real choices are made possible.