The message of the Bible for the politics of the contemporary West is that it is not enough to have a state. You also need a society – meaning, that common belonging that comes from a sense that we are neighbours as well as strangers; that we have duties to one another, to the heritage of the past and to the hopes of generations not yet born; that

The best we could hope for is a modest kind of politics, one in which we do not seek to implement an ideal but in which we grant people maximum freedom to pursue the different and conflicting ideals that constitute the human situation.