GRACE DAVIE, the sociologist of religion, reports a conversation that took place during a survey in Islington in 1968. The interviewer asked a resident: “Do you believe in God?” “Yes”, the individual replied. “Do you believe in a God who can change the course of events on Earth?” continued the interviewer, “No” replied the interviewee, “just the ordinary one.” The exchange could still happen today. Most Britons still believe in God, but the God they believe in is “the ordinary one” who makes little practical difference either to their own lives, or to those of the society to which they belong.

It is therefore a striking feature of Christianity in contemporary Britain that the most confident Christian perspective is the one most at odds with that of the man in the (Islington) street. Against the flow of opinion both outside the churches and to an extent on the more liberal end of the Christian spectrum, Evangelical Christianity maintains that God can change the course of events on earth and looks for the realisation of this hope in British social and political life.

On Monday this week the Evangelical Alliance — an umbrella group representing a million Evangelical Christians in the UK — published the report of a Commission of Inquiry on Faith and Nation. Though not a member of the Evangelical Alliance, I served on the commission, which took in a wide variety of theological and political viewpoints. The report spans 170 pages and took three years to prepare. It received 100 written submissions and heard a dozen oral presentations. The aim of the report was not simply to take stock of current Evangelical attitudes and activities. What the report aspires to is for the Christian Gospel to inform and shape British social and political life in the 21st century.

For the Evangelical Alliance, founded in 1846, the attitude towards social and political engagement displayed in the report represents a return to its historic roots. From its origins in the late 17th century Evangelical faith was a serious call to a devout and holy life that encompassed personal spirituality and social ethics.

Early Evangelicals proposed both a renewal of faith and a renewal of the nation, urging conversion not only on “harlots, and publicans, and thieves” but on politicians and profiteers who turned a blind eye to the slave trade and a deaf ear to the child labourers who bore the industrial revolution on their backs.

Today Evangelicals are likely to be accused, certainly in the United States and increasingly in Britain, of seeking to impose the moral and religious views of a self-righteous minority on a majority of irreligious but tolerant fellow citizens. At other points in their history Evangelicals were more commonly criticised for ignoring politics to focus on personal salvation. Some historians have asserted that Evangelical Christianity was a form of psychic and political oppression that held ordinary people back from genuine progress.

Such criticisms are not without truth. Yet critics should not be allowed to have it both ways: Evangelical Christianity can not both avoid politics and tell politicians what to do.

The Faith and Nation report makes 100 recommendations on issues as diverse as constitutional reform, religious liberty, human rights and the environment. They are now in the public domain and we are free to think about them or ignore them. Evangelical Christianity committed itself in the 19th century to a remoralisation of society. With some mistakes, and the usual human mixture of virtue and hypocrisy, but overall to the common good, it fulfilled many of the movement’s political aims.

Who knows if Evangelical Christianity will ever have such an impact again? Evangelicals, at least, will think the answer depends on which sort of God is sovereign: the ordinary one, or the one who can indeed change individuals and societies.

Stephen Plant teaches theology in Cambridge.