In America, the picture seems more rosy. 65% of Americans identify as Christian. But ten years ago the figure was around 75%. And in the early 1980s it was close to 90%. The trajectory is clear.

There is, of course, a distinction between identifying as a Christian and going to church every week. On the latter front the picture in Western Europe is strikingly bleak. As Harriet Sherwood puts it in the Guardian: “In the UK, France, Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands, between 56% and 60% said they never go to church, and between 63% and 66% said they never pray”. But what interests me more is disaffiliation — the lack of willingness to espouse even a Christian identity.

This is secularisation: the transformation of religion from an integral part of civic life to a fading husk. The relationship between Christianity and secularisation, framed this way, looks antagonistic. Secularisation is Christianity’s bête noire.

David Lloyd Dusenbury’s new book, The Innocence of Pontius Pilate, investigates the relationship between Christianity and the secular. And he comes to a radically different conclusion. Rather than viewing them as conflicting poles, Dusenbury argues that the secular is a product of Christian thinking.

This viewpoint, or something very similar to it, is advanced in Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual, Tom Holland’s Dominion, Nick Spencer’s The Evolution of the West, and many works by John Gray. I don’t think Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are fans of this view.

Secularity, he writes, doesn’t come “from a priest-baiting eighteenth-century philosophe”. Rather, “it is a coinage of medieval Christian writers”.

To substantiate his thesis, Dusenbury goes further back than medieval Europe to the most consequential legal judgement in the history of western civilisation: the Roman trial of Jesus.

When we think of secular, we immediately conceive it in terms of the privatisation of religious belief. Properly speaking, the secularist would say, religion does not belong in the public sphere. But a more fundamental distinction is between the temporal and the divine: what is secular is the distinction between the laws of man and the laws of God.

What constitutes the secular, in this frame, owes much to an utterance made by Jesus in the Gospel of John. As he is tried and convicted by Pontius Pilate, Jesus proclaims: “My kingdom is not of this world”.

This still seems abstract. How does that allusive proclamation lead to a greater limit of religion’s role in society? A famously doctrinaire bishop in an African port city is the first person to edge us towards our modern conception of the secular: Augustine of Hippo.

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Augustine’s Homilies on the Gospel of John is crucial for understanding the secular. Augustine insists on the guilt of Pilate in the trial of Jesus. And he contrastingly affirms the innocence of Christ. Augustine, writes Dusenbury, is thus “led… to theorise the reign of God and the kingship of Jesus in a way that radically contrasts them with the ‘reign’ of any human empire and the ‘kingship’ of any human sovereign”.

When Augustine examines Jesus’s statement “my kingdom is not of this world”, according to Dusenbury, “he hears a delineation, by Jesus, of a novel form of jurisdiction that renders all other forms of jurisdiction, eo ipso, worldly — which is to say, secular”. Most human judgements are, according to Augustine, “melancholy and lamentable”.

This means “they derive not only from human laws and insights but from human ignorance and prejudice”. Human laws are provisional and subject to the failures and biases of human reasoning. By contrast, the law of the Lord is perfect.

Another Roman African, Pope Gelasius, substantiated this distinction in the late 5^th century when he proclaimed in Latin duo sont. This means: “there are two”. The laws of Caesar are distinct from the laws of Christ. According to Gelasius, “no Caesar is competent to clarify the ‘venerable mysteries’ that are celebrated, and promulgated, by the church”.

Ultimately, writes Dusenbury, “it is the African prelates Augustine and Gelasius, I believe, who transmit to medieval clerics and legal theorists in Europe a lexicon of ‘secular power’, and an interpretation of the Roman trial of Jesus that will be cited and reconceived, between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries, in continent-shaping ways”.

How is this interpretation of what is secular seen in the early modern period? This was the time when our modern notion of toleration was first thoroughly systemised. Hobbes, according to Dusenbury, argued that the “Ecclesiastics ‘have not Regal Power in this world’, Hobbes writes, for the simple reason that ‘the Kingdom of Christ is not of this world’. It is only because of this – which is to say, because of the Roman trial of Jesus – that Hobbes can definitively state that ‘Faith hath no relation to, nor dependence at all upon Compulsion’”.

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Because the law of God has no jurisdiction in the world of man, people should not be compelled to subscribe to religious doctrine. The case for identifying with Christianity thus rests on the persuasive power of Christian doctrine itself.

Dusenbury also examines Samuel von Pufendorf’s interpretation of the trial of Jesus in light of secular power. Pufendorf, little read now, is according to Dusenbury “Locke’s rival in forging the modern logic of toleration”. Jesus, according to Pufendorf, is a king but “his kingdom is not of this world. A correct reading of the Roman trial of Jesus is thus, according to Pufendorf, a sine qua non of a European political culture in which ritual and confessional differences are tolerated”.

Because the sovereignty of Jesus does not extend to the drama of human life, differences between communities need to be tolerated — as a way of managing the conflicts and imperfections that come with being human as much as anything else. To assume Christian doctrine ought to have a monopoly on human behaviour is to suggest Jesus does in fact have jurisdiction in this world. This goes against the injunction: “my Kingdom is not of this world”. The interpretation expressed from Augustine to Pufendorf, by contrast, underpins one of the distinguishing features of modernity: religious and ideological tolerance.

Tolerance also immediately evokes the Enlightenment. And one of the most striking parts of his book is Dusenbury’s comparison between two giants of the French Enlightenment: Voltaire and Rousseau. “Voltaire”, he writes, “is obsessed, in a thoroughly provincial way, with the infamies of Christian Europe”.

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The Voltairian position is familiar. Christianity is a bastion of intolerance and persecution. A religion which, left unhindered by the civilising force of secular power, is a threat to universal human rights.

But Dusenbury adds that, “Rousseau, levelling his eye on further horizons, realises that it is Christianity’s critique of cultic violence, and its unease with the archaic temple-state, that must be entered into what Paul Veyne called the ‘inventory of differences’ of global history”.

The temple-state is the synthesis of religion and state. And it is an integral part of the non-Christian world. The key point, as Dusenbury puts it, is that “Pilate is a legate of the Roman temple-state in the Judaean temple-city. For Pilate, as for the Judaean Temple elites who charge Jesus with blasphemy and treason, the codes of religio and the saeculum had not been decoupled. It is in part because Jesus decouples them that he is sent to the cross”.

What are the implications of this? If Jesus died not only to redeem humanity but also to “decouple” the temple from the state, then embedded within Christianity itself is the conviction that religion should have a limited role in organising the civic life of a nation. Expressed another way, the fact that people don’t feel obliged to identify as Christian anymore, and are thus rapidly peeling away from it, is itself a consequence of Christianity.

A large part of why there are so few Christians is because many baby boomers lost interest in Christianity and raised their millennial children without any religious affiliation. The conventional explanation for this is the permissive society from the 1960s onwards, but if permissiveness — my kingdom is not of this world — is deeply woven into Christianity itself then the rapid decline of Christian affiliation is unsurprising. Some now joke, with a mixture of Wildean exuberance and smirk, that the Anglican Church is no longer a Christian institution. But it is simply following a normal path.

Which is not the same as saying it is following a necessary path. There are many strands of Christianity. During the medieval and early modern period many Christian churches did embody intolerance. Today, many Christians (and non-Christians) do intelligently argue that Christianity should play a more prominent part in public life. But religions are complex entities, entangled with deep tensions.

Dusenbury emphasises the oddity of Christianity when he mentions the Justinian law code. The central irony, as he puts it, is this: “Justinian inscribes, at the head of his foyer-text to his monumental code of Roman law (and with it, of much European law), as a sanctifying and legitimating figure, the name of a man who was crucified by a Roman judge as a Roman convict”.

Christianity is, of course, flourishing in sub-Saharan Africa. And the most Christian part of Britain is London — in part due to immigration. But is it any surprise that a religion with the Code of Justinian can also provide the context for its own material demise?

Another counterpoint is that America is officially a secular state while European countries usually have state religions — and the former country has a more vigorous religious culture than the latter countries. This is true. But I am interested in secularisation less as a description of how a country is constituted, and more as a social fact and an evolving process. And even in America the prominence of religion in civic life has been in decline.

Dusenbury’s dense, erudite book is not only a historical account and an exercise in theological exegesis; it is also a veiled commentary on our contemporary religious landscape.

Is this increasingly post-Christian landscape sunny? There was a recent report by a think tank called Onward which found that the proportion of under-35s saying they have just one or no close friends has trebled in the past 10 years: from 7% to 22%. Millennials and members of Generation Z are less likely to be members of a group or participate in group activities than previous generations were at similar ages. And people under 25 are three times more likely than people over 65 to distrust their neighbours.

Joining a Church won’t be a panacea to these issues; but it probably will encourage a wider network of friendships and a greater sense of civic belonging. Then again, as Joseph Henrich pointed out in his book The Weirdest People in the World, the move away from extended family networks to smaller-scale communities is itself a consequence of Christian marriage norms.

Christianity gives with one hand and takes away with another.

Closer to my home, after our nearest town got rid of its police station, the result was a wave of burglaries. The nearest police station is now 15 miles away, so even if you spot thieves actually robbing your garage it’ll take a minimum of 30 minutes for Plod to reach you, by which time they’re long gone.

Resident after resident posted furiously in our local Facebook group about the thefts. Eventually it was our turn: despite security measures our garage was cleaned out, with the burglars taking bikes, tools — even a spare set of alloy wheels.

The recent protests following the death of George Floyd have seen a growing chorus of voices calling for US cities to ‘defund’ or even to ‘abolish’ the police. Though ‘defund’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘do away with altogether’, in the light of our own garage-robbery my first reaction was to raise an eyebrow. The reflexive conservative argument against getting rid of the police boils down to “it’s a stupid idea, because only force can keep human wickedness in check”. As happened in Vitoria, and Montreal, and my small town, conservatives argue, reducing a society’s ability to enforce the common good results in more crime.

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Without the police, the argument goes, you’ll end up with vigilantes and private armies. Thomas Hobbes, one of the first political theorists to envisage society as a contract, argued in Leviathan (1651) that the only way to stop societies degenerating into a “war of all against all” was for the state to have a monopoly on violence. The state, he suggested, should have an absolute right to enforce what’s best for everyone, rather than one person’s particular interest. So to avoid general anarchy, we cede our personal desire to enforce our will, exact revenge (or retrieve our bikes) to officials charged with doing so in a fair and even-handed way.

In a small town, the criminal element is usually well-known, and sure enough, neighbours had seen the usual suspects loitering by our back gate in the small hours on the night it happened. Other eyewitnesses saw one of them passing one of our bikes over a fence into a vacant lot about 24 hours later. We even saw one of them riding my husband’s bike in the market square.

In good social-contract spirit, rather than whipping up a posse, we dutifully reported all the eyewitness accounts to the police. But officers never followed up. They were, though, very keen to respond to any sign of vigilante justice. On one occasion my husband spotted the usual suspects climbing over our wall and chased them down the alleyway. Shortly afterwards, a PCSO appeared in our street, in response to a report of “some northerner shouting at children”.

So is the point of police really to act as ultimate backstop for the common good, as I believed? Anti-policing campaigners argue that no, the experience of my small town is evidence that police aren’t on our side at all. Instead, rather than being there to uphold the common good, police exist to keep the already-marginalised in their place via violence, petty rules and incarceration, while ignoring white-collar crime and protecting only the rich. There is no common good, only the interests of the wealthy and the frustrated needs of the masses: my experience just demonstrates that I don’t count as important enough to be worth protecting.

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Campaigners argue that instead of calling for ever more cops on the streets, we should work to eliminate the need for authoritarian policing by getting rid of the social ills the police exist to suppress. Residents of Minneapolis are about to find out whether or not this works: the city council has declared its intention to abolish the city’s police department and replace it with an ‘alternative model’.

A look at The End of Policing by the sociologist Alex Vitale suggests that this ‘alternative model’ means redirecting resources from police violence and prisons toward housing, mental health services, youth services and restorative justice.

Here we find a clue to why conservatives react so furiously to proposals to abolish the police: it’s founded in a radically un-conservative understanding of human nature. Rousseau, the grandfather of modern liberalism, wrote in The Social Contract (1762) that “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”. For Rousseau, humans were naturally good and it’s the influence of society that corrupts us.

From this core premise flows the progressive belief that humans are only warped out of true by economic misery, racism, bad cultural norms and other forms of distortion on our innately prosocial instincts. If you believe this, it’s a short step to the arguments of anti-police campaigners that if only we can get rid of economic injustice, people will stop doing bad things.

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You have to be very blinkered to dispute the idea that squalor and desperation breed rule-breaking, and that reducing squalor and desperation are likely to increase a willingness to abide by societal rules. So on the surface, the police-abolition argument looks a great deal like refocusing on the common good. But on closer inspection, it turns out to be a more cuddly version of the same old story.

The writer Chris Arnade argued recently that the main purpose of the police today is to stop the poor taking too literally the example of the modern rich. That is, an asset-stripping private equity partner and a ghetto gangster display the same antisocial indifference to the wider impact of their destructive selfishness. But this attitude is praised in the former, while the latter will spend his life being harassed by police.

You could say, perhaps, that in policing terms it’s Hobbes for the poor and Rousseau for the rich. The poor get ferocious authoritarian clampdowns, while the rich are encouraged to follow their instincts in pursuit of the goodness it’s assumed will unfurl naturally if only they follow their instincts.

In these terms, the anti-police argument is really that instead of having Rousseau for the rich and Hobbes for the poor, it should be Rousseau for everyone. But the truth is that these variants on the social-contract view of society share a blind spot: values.

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Both the Hobbesian and the Rousseauian view, as I’ve (admittedly very reductively) characterised them, see human societies as value-neutral. For Hobbes, there are no generally shared values and the good society is enforced from the top by authority. For Rousseau, the good society has the potential to emerge naturally from humans’ instinctive goodness if only we can reorganise it the right way. But for both, humans are first and foremost individuals who can — and should — pursue their individual instincts and desires.

But how are we meant to imagine what a good society looks like, if we can’t even agree on the values we share? The police-abolishers seem to be suggesting this should be determined by local communities according to their needs. What then if a local community decided its safety depended on excluding a particular ethnic or sexual minority? A glance at the BLM manifesto page suggests such an attempt would receive short shrift from the wider movement for community-driven public safety.

So what we’ve actually done is kick the can of moral authority down the road. Who gets to set the new limits on the power of communities to determine their own public safety priorities? No one seems willing to tackle this question frankly, even as we watch a new morality toppling the statues of the old order and convening new types of public sacrament.

And even as it sidles round the question of who holds moral authority, the ‘Rousseau for everyone’ vision also skips lightly over the effectiveness of rehabilitation. That is, many would doubtless benefit from more emphasis on therapeutic interventions such as drug rehab, counselling or welfare. But advocates of these measures often seem reluctant to address the question of whether everyone truly can be healed.

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The perpetrators of my town’s mini crime wave are well known locally. I can vouch that there’s nothing wrong with their mental health. This isn’t a high unemployment area. They’re not robbing garages because structural injustice has stripped them of other options; they’re doing it because they can. There’s no reason to suppose asking them nicely or giving them subsidised housing, counsellors or free stuff would make them stop. So what do you do with the minority who refuse to be cured with kindness?

It’s not enough to imagine that you can bring about the good life just by providing the poor with more resources in the hopes that they self-actualise their way out of iniquity. Rising wealth doesn’t seem to be having this effect on the liberal rich. So (to paraphrase Roosevelt) we can all agree to speak more softly, but who do we then authorise to stand in the background carrying a big stick?

We should be less troubled by proposals to reimagine the police than by this evasiveness on questions of authorised violence and punishment, and on who has the power to determine public values. So far the official answer seems to be that we don’t need any such authorised violence, or public morality — just a more equal distribution of resources and freedom. But all this does is provide a smokescreen for whoever now has the power to set ethical parameters.

My frustration with the “Rousseau for everyone” idealists isn’t that they’re advocating a new public morality, it’s that they’re smuggling it in under the guise of more freedom. And even as the actual shape of this morality stays tacit, so too do the mechanisms for enforcing it. Because make no mistake: any social order necessitates a degree of repression. And a Rousseau-flavoured reimagining of public safety might understand how you feel, but it will still be equipped with tasers.

Rousseau, one of the most famous public moralists in Europe, was contemptuous of the idea that Britain is a democracy. “The people of England regards itself as free,” he wrote, “but it is grossly mistaken; it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing.”

The philosopher was born and raised as a citizen of Geneva, then a small, independent city-state with a long tradition of direct democracy. That is what the word democracy meant at the time – the idea of a representative democracy, where voters elect people to govern on their behalf, was seen as a contradiction in terms, and not just by Rousseau. If he were alive today he would not recognise any states as democratic in his sense, since all that call themselves by that name are in fact ruled by elected elites, not by the people. They are really oligarchies — rule by the few — politely disguised as so-called “representative democracies”.

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Although Rousseau was not the first person to champion popular sovereignty, he has always been its most potent and persuasive advocate. That is why his famous political work, The Social Contract, has been continuously in print since it was first published two and a half centuries ago, a political classic still read by thousands of people across the world every year. It sets out the case for popular rule more powerfully than any book ever written, which makes it a key text for our own time. It is more timely now than either Marx’s Communist Manifesto or John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which is not to deny their own importance and relevance.

Rousseau believed that the ‘general will’ of the people is the only legitimate basis for political rule, a very radical idea in the 1760s and one that has inspired generations of revolutionaries and populists ever since. The leaders of the French Revolution held Rousseau in the highest esteem, much as Lenin regarded Marx, which is why some of the bloody excesses of that event tarnished his reputation, even though the Rousseau had died a decade earlier. The reference to the law as an expression of the general will (volonté générale) in the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was almost certainly directly inspired by Rousseau. It represents a radical transformation in the foundations of legitimate government.

The Founding Fathers of the US, by contrast, were not impressed by his ideas, since they feared mob rule and the tyranny of the majority as much as royal despotism. This is why they designed a complicated political system that was deliberately weak and full of checks on the popular will, such as the Electoral College, the Bill of Rights, and the Supreme Court, as bulwarks against democratic despotism. They deliberately founded a republic, not a democracy, a word that nowhere appears in the American constitution.

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The form of democracy that Rousseau advocated was not liberal. His political models were in the ancient world (above all Sparta and Republican Rome) and in modern, Calvinist Geneva. He argued that democracy could not function unless its citizens truly cared about the public good above their own private good. They must be public-spirited citizens before they are self-interested individuals. The best way to achieve this, he thought, is by an intense civic pride that overcomes our natural selfishness and strengthens the bonds of citizenship. “Do we want peoples to be virtuous?” he asked. “Let us then start by making them love their country.” That is why many 20th century liberals have condemned Rousseau as a “totalitarian democrat”.

But not everyone who rejects the liberal, representative form of democracy is necessarily a totalitarian. Rousseau is better understood as a precursor of what is now called “national populism” (a term recently coined by the political scientists Matthew Goodwin and Roger Eatwell). He saw a basic incompatibility between liberalism and democracy and took his stand with the latter.

Rousseau was from a modest family of provincial craftsmen who came to see his age as deeply corrupt, divided and unjust. He is the eloquent voice of those who feel alienated, disempowered and ignored by the rich and powerful who dominate politics and benefit most from a system of government that was originally meant to be “of the people, by the people, for the people”, grievances that sound very familiar to our ears today. Rousseau’s faith was in the simple virtues and humility of ordinary citizens, which he contrasted with the decadence and arrogance of the elites who ruled pre-revolutionary France.

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The compound “liberal democracy” is coming apart in our time, as Rousseau would have predicted it must, a victim of its own inherent contradictions. The recent rise of populism is increasingly forcing a choice on us.

On one side, it has provoked many liberals to challenge policies they dislike in the courts and to sharpen their attacks on more direct forms of democracy (such as referendums and popular initiatives) in favour of diluted, representative forms, often in the name of the “sovereignty of Parliament”. They sound a lot like classical liberals of the 19th century such as Mill, who were uneasy with the rising power and assertiveness of ordinary citizens whose views and behaviour they perceived as a threat to the idea of man as a “progressive being” (in his words).

On the other side, many populists are now increasingly impatient with liberal, cosmopolitan values, which they view as the ideology of a privileged elite detached from the lives of ordinary citizens and disdainful of their views.

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What seems new to us is really a resurgence of a debate that goes back to Rousseau’s time, before the 19th century foundation of liberal democracy, which has long been the established form of democratic rule in the West. We are moving from an age of “liberalism and democracy” to an age of “liberalism or democracy” again.

Nationalist democratic politicians who are openly critical of liberal pluralism, such as Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán and Jair Bolsonaro, are increasingly common now, even in western Europe, although not yet dominant there. They see liberalism as weakening democratic solidarity and identity, whereas liberal democratic leaders, such as Angela Merkel, Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron, see liberalism as essential to democracy. Challenges to the liberal conception of democracy are likely to grow, echoing the language and ideas of Rousseau.

As the old and increasingly obsolete political ideologies of Left and Right that emerged in the wake of the American and French revolutions over two centuries ago give way to a new axis of political debate around globalism and elitism on the one hand, and populism and nationalism on the other, Rousseau’s relevance and importance is bound to grow even more. Rousseau, the prophet of populism, is a thinker whose time has come again, for better or for worse.

How To Think Politically: Sages, Scholars and Statesmen Whose Ideas Have Shaped the World, by Graeme Garrard and James Bernard Murphy, is published on 8th August (Bloomsbury, £14.99)