The tragedy of Henry Nowak raises a deeper question than guilt or innocence: what happens when a society abandons Christian anthropology and replaces it with a secular doctrine of human perfectibility? The shock of being told about the way in which Henry Nowak died, stabbed to death by a member of the Sikh community who combined murder with character assassination, leaves us wanting to hold somebody accountable and to blame them.

Obviously, his murderer is to blame. But that is not a sufficient solution because the police created such a gross injustice that we are shocked to our core at what this represents about what our society has become. It is also very tempting to blame the police. However difficult it is to control our sense of outrage and injustice, in the timeworn phrase, they too are casualties of a sort, for they were trained – in fact brainwashed – in the art of the new secular moral idealism that has replaced Christian philosophy and ethics. So our real enemy is not (just) the police, who committed this gross injustice because they were brainwashed by those who trained them, but rather the anti-Christian ethic that overcame Christian philosophy and culture.

We might want to claim that the tragic death of Henry Nowak, stabbed and misrepresented, handcuffed and injured, is the final outcome of this terrible philosophy of ethics: secular moral idealism. So let us attack that rather than allow our critique of the ideology that brainwashed the agents the police have become to be arrested (so to speak) in its aims.

The enemy we are struggling against needs to be given a name. That is not an easy process, but let us do what we can and identify it as secular moral idealism. Secular moral idealism is the belief that human beings are morally perfectible through education, legislation and social engineering. It seeks to abolish what we might call the universal human phenomenon of “fear of the other” because such fear offends against the humanist assumption that people can be educated into virtue and compelled by law to behave accordingly.

Christianity takes exactly the opposite view – which is one reason secular moral idealism finds Christianity so difficult to tolerate. Christianity believes that human beings are not perfectible and therefore require both restraint through law and transformation of mind and soul. The conflict before us is therefore not merely political. It is anthropological. It concerns what kind of creatures human beings actually are.

We could begin by doing what has recently become almost impossible, and that is to examine critically the modern concept of racism. This is high-risk commentary indeed because racism has become one of the gravest sins anybody living in a culture formed by secular moral idealism can commit.

And yet the concept itself has become increasingly vacuous. The emperor of racism has no clothes. He is naked and dangerous. The problem is not that people are incapable of hostility towards others. We clearly are. The problem is that racism has become an elastic and politically charged category that is invoked constantly but defined only vaguely, if (scientifically) at all.

There is no scientific definition of race itself, and therefore no stable foundation upon which the modern moral panic surrounding racism can comfortably rest. What has happened instead is that racism has become a shorthand, impossible to define precisely and impossible to recognise consistently, for that great blasphemy against humanistic optimism: fear of the other.

It is time, it is long past the time, that the Church found some courage and confronted this confusion with robust intellectual energy. If we continue to surrender to these conceptual ambiguities and distortions, we will never be able to confront the deeper shortcomings of secular moral idealism itself. Worse than the instability of the concept of race is the fact that this elusive distinction has increasingly morphed into a thought crime.

And so our society combines two dangerous errors. First, it attempts to criminalise something whose boundaries remain hopelessly uncertain. Secondly, it presumes that it possesses the ability to look inside the mind of the accused and discern evil intent.

The danger of thought crimes is that they become the superstructure upon which authoritarian societies are built. They are a political and psychological mechanism for attributing moral guilt despite the fact that we cannot see inside one another’s heads.

The distinction between action and motivation is notoriously difficult to determine with certainty. Yet secular moral idealism increasingly insists that it can do exactly that.

The modern sin of racism has therefore become a politicised version of the universal human experience of fearing the unknown. If we are to unravel this ethical confusion, we need to recognise what might be called moral dualism.

Every moral principle has two sides to it. Perhaps we should call it the moral Janus effect. Janus was the Roman god who looked both ways: the god of doorways, beginnings and transitions. We might invoke him as a reminder that every moral principle contains within it the possibility of both vice and virtue, wisdom and folly.

So, in the case of fear of the other, there is a perfectly sensible form of caution towards strangers which we are hardwired to possess and which is frequently dismissed as racism.

When a stranger approaches us, there is no immediate way of knowing whether he comes as a friend or as a threat. Prudence therefore requires caution until we understand who the stranger is and what his intentions may be.

Fear of the other, in this sense, is not irrational. It is part of the way human beings have been equipped to deal with uncertainty and danger. But this should not be confused with the lazy fear of the other which cannot be bothered to discover the virtue that may lie beneath unfamiliar customs, unfamiliar clothes, unfamiliar tastes and unfamiliar habits. That is a sin of laziness, more than hatred.

Neither of these responses constitutes racism in any meaningful sense, and each must be judged according to its own merits and demerits. The Janus principle reminds us that prudence and prejudice can look superficially similar while being morally very different indeed.

Christianity has its own ethic for dealing with fear of the other, whether legitimate or illegitimate, and it is expressed in the invitation to love our neighbours as ourselves. But the neighbour is almost by definition somebody we know. We may not like them. They may irritate us. They may annoy us or even damage us. But we know them. They are not the same as the stranger.

It would be foolish to construct a moral law that simply said, “Love the stranger as yourself,” because that would deprive us of the ability to discover whether the stranger had our best interests at heart or had come to destroy us. Much depends upon context. A stranger may be vulnerable and alone, or he may come as part of an invading army. A neighbour, however, is somebody whom we have come to know.

The profundity of the biblical command to love our neighbour is rooted in the Christian understanding that our neighbour is made in the image of God. God has invested Himself in that person’s creation and preservation. The recognition of God in our neighbour is expressed through the requirement to offer love, not because the neighbour has earned it, but because God has associated Himself with the neighbour’s existence.

One of the reasons Henry Nowak lay bleeding on the street and was handcuffed by police who falsely attributed racist motivation to him is that we as Christians have surrendered too easily to the moral blackmail of secular moral idealism. We have accepted a confused and increasingly incoherent understanding of racism in place of something more challenging, more complex, more demanding and more serious. Our institutions have in turn been trained to enforce that ideology in its contemporary form.

No lasting good will come from this terrible tragedy if we end up blaming Sikhs as a community (though the murderer was a Sikh who weaponised racism against his victim); or the police as an agency (though they surrendered to moral myopia and practised injustice); or even those ideologues who have imposed secular moral idealism upon the agencies of our culture (though they are creating a police state against the very people they were engaged and charged to protect).

We should instead honour the death of Henry Nowak by finding the courage to engage in a renewed philosophical and theological argument with those who have succumbed to the seductions of secular moral idealism and its belief that human beings can be perfected through education, legislation and ideological conformity.

The deepest conflict before us is not between races, cultures or religions. It is between two rival visions of the human person. It is between secularism and Christianity. It is between Rousseau and Marx, and Jesus. One insists that human beings are perfectible through education, legislation and social engineering. The other recognises that human beings are fallen, capable of both virtue and vice, and therefore in need not merely of instruction but of redemption.

The tragedy of Henry Nowak should remind Christians that whenever we abandon the biblical understanding of human nature, we do not become more compassionate. We become more vulnerable to illusion. And illusions, when armed with institutional power, eventually demand victims.

If this death teaches us anything, it is that the Church must recover the confidence to proclaim once again the truth about man, sin, judgement and salvation. Only then will we possess the intellectual and moral resources to resist the next injustice, to repudiate a system that is being constructed on injustice, before we are finally and completely imprisoned.

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