On 16 October, Sky News host Peta Credlin told guests at the Archbishop’s Dinner in Melbourne that Christians must make the case for Australia’s Judeo-Christian heritage in public life. According to CathNews’ report of the speech, she warned that the foundations of modern Australia face hostility and indifference, and that neutrality is no longer enough.
Credlin is right about one thing: ideas that sustain a free society do not defend themselves. The rule of law, freedom of speech and individual rights need principled advocates. But calling these achievements “Christian values” obscures both their foundation and their meaning.
A system of values follows from a view of reality and a way of deciding what is true. Christianity begins with a supernatural God, revelation, and faith. Its moral teachings must be understood in that framework. If God exists, commands human beings, and determines their eternal fate, then obedience to God determines what is or is not moral.
That is why God’s metaphysical status cannot simply be removed from the discussion while selected moral conclusions are retained. If a divine judge really will reward belief and punish unbelief, then people should act on that fact. But before it can guide anyone’s life, the claim must have an objective standing. A claim detached from observation and offered without evidence is not a difficult hypothesis waiting to be disproved. It is arbitrary: there is no objective method by which to assess it as true or false.
Faith is the acceptance of a claim separate from evidence. In “Faith and Force,” Ayn Rand argued that reason gives people a common point of reference in reality, while appeals to supernatural authority leave no common method for resolving disagreement. Once revelation replaces evidence, persuasion ultimately gives way to authority: whose revelation, whose interpretation and whose commands?
Nor should the content of Christian morality be identified with modern individualism. The Bible repeatedly presents faith, obedience, humility and self-denial as virtues. It tells believers to subordinate earthly concerns to God, to take up the cross and to regard sacrificial love as a moral ideal. Religion does not have the same moral outlook as the view that each person’s life is their own and that the pursuit of personal flourishing is good.
History also cautions against crediting Christianity with institutions that emerged as its cultural authority weakened. Medieval Europe was pervaded by Christian doctrine and power. Consequently, it was not an age of individual liberty, scientific confidence or political freedom. The revival of classical learning during the Renaissance, followed by the Enlightenment’s growing emphasis on reason, nature and the individual, produced a different world - a world objectively better suited to human life.
The better roots of the Western tradition reach back to ancient Greece: confidence in reason, an interest in the natural world and the idea that human life on earth is worthy of study and achievement. While nominally Chirstian scholars often transmitted these ideas, that does not make them inherently of Christian origin, just as a thinker’s Christianity does not make every idea they hold Christian.
John Locke was a Christian, but the political ideas for which he became influential also drew on a naturalistic and Aristotelian tradition: knowledge through experience, the moral importance of human agency, and rights to life, liberty and property.
A rational defence of freedom starts elsewhere. Human beings survive by thinking, producing and cooperating voluntarily. The rule of law restrains arbitrary power and lets people plan their lives. Individual rights protect the freedom to act on one’s judgement, provided one does not initiate force against others. Free speech enables inquiry and correction. Property rights and trade allow people to create and voluntarily exchange value.
These principles are not free-floating preferences, and they are not moral fragments that can be shared while their foundations are politely ignored. They follow from a secular view of human beings as rational agents whose lives are ends in themselves. That foundation matters because political principles cannot be defended consistently by appealing to a worldview that places revelation above reason and self-sacrifice above individual flourishing.
Credlin’s concern about cultural apathy is justified. Australians should understand and defend the ideas on which a free society depends. But the answer is not to preserve faith in public life or to place liberty under a religious banner. It is to identify freedom’s actual foundations and argue them unapologetically: reality over revelation, reason over faith, and the individual’s right to live their own life.
Mysticism is the fantasy of knowledge without the means of acquiring. Moral values are too important an issue to be dealt with by means of mysticism - which is to say: by no means at all.
References
Comini, R. (2026, October 23). Defend the Christian voice and its values: Credlin. CathNews. https://cathnews.com/2026/10/23/defend-the-christian-voice-and-its-values-credlin/
Pinto, R. (2024, December 11). Ben Bayer on the secular concept of individual rights. New Ideal. https://newideal.aynrand.org/p/ben-bayer-on-the-secular-concept-of-individual-rights-video
Pinto, R. (2025, September 29). What is Western civilization? New Ideal. https://newideal.aynrand.org/p/what-is-western-civilization-video
