Liberal democracy and Christianity are not synonymous. Yet Western Christians, faced with the multiple catastrophes that are now happening every day in Ukraine, might make the mistake of thinking so. They see Vladimir Putin’s attack on that country as the realisation, in proxy or prototype form, of an almost apocalyptic battle between two sets of beliefs. Holy Russia stands for all that is sacred; Western democracy for all that is not. To Putin, the West is decadent, immoral, secular, rudderless, subject to popular whim, essentially spineless, driven by the interests of an amoral American capitalism. And it is expansionist of its very nature, a threat to his idea of Russia.

On the other hand, Western democrats tend to regard the world they have created as some kind of final statement of what a civilised society should look like, if not “the end of history” then certainly one of its last chapters. A community of nations was assembled after the Second World War under a set of rules contained in the United Nations Charter, a fundamental principle of which was that nations should never again pursue their interests and national goals by attacking each other. But liberal democracy was not part of that deal. The closest it came was in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that the UN adopted in 1948. But in principle alternative forms of government, including absolute monarchies and totalitarian dictatorships, were not excluded – indeed there would have been no such Declaration without their consent.