THERE are many profound conflicts between the demands of reason, embodied in the concept of citizenship, and the call of faith, which has often involved a celebration of particularity and mystery combined with an obdurate traditionalism. The conflict is political, philosophical, theological and historical.

The origins of citizenship are to be found in the city states of Athens and Rome, and it embraced a politics in which human beings came to be seen as the ultimate source of power. Christianity began its life as the most profound rebellion against the Greco-Roman concept of human deification. Against this, it asserted the Christian virtues of humility, faith, charity and prayer as a constant warning against the vanity and self-glorification of triumphant classical paganism. Early Christians believed that power lay outside the world in the will of God, that the race was not to the quick and victory to the strong.

The classical civic inheritance of citizenship, with its emphasis on reason and self-government, was treasured by succeeding waves of European intellectual and political movements which opposed what they considered to be the absolutist obscurantism of Roman Catholicism.

The French Revolution initiated the full institutional expression of a longstanding war between reason and dogma, liberty and tradition, democracy and privilege. It was the unique position of the Catholic Church to oppose revolution and evolution, rights and democracy, science and literature, truth and the imagination.

There was, however, plenty to be feared from the type of politics that flowed from the French Revolution. The subordination of all institutions to the State and the glorification of its collective power, explicit in republicanism, created suspicion among the faithful of the rational certainties expressed by social engineering at the level of the state, and the Panglossian cruelty of free markets within the economy.

The 19th and 20th centuries were characterised by this secular fear of religious authoritarianism and by religious antagonism towards both materialism and an exclusively human conception of power. In political terms, the Left was secular and the Right more accommodating to traditional faith institutions. The figures of Stalin and Franco express perfectly the mutual fears of both sides.

I would suggest that this war is now over, that the cultural and political conflict between citizenship and faith which began with the French Revolution ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I would further suggest that in our contemporary urban environment, characterised as it is by very strong forces that deny the moral status of the person entirely, citizenship and faith are mutually necessary traditions of political reasoning. Both will have to carry a great deal of weight in the coming years if the twin perils of relentless commodification and identity-based tribalism are to be ameliorated.

The necessary mutuality between faith and citizenship is found in the fact that, in politics, citizenship is never enough, but religion is always too much.

Societies, no matter how liberal, always make some reference to community, brotherhood, belonging and solidarity. Likewise, there is always some form of fraternity tacked onto the liberty and equality that form the basis of rights. The austerity of political neutrality has never been enough to generate the mutual sacrifices necessary for achieving citizenship. Religion without reason, however, invariably involves violence, repression and injustice.

A political theology combining a commitment to human rights at a national level and strong democracy at a local level is compatible with traditions within every great religion. The sanctity of human life, the idea that each person is capable of being and doing good, and that the circumstances of life should nurture and strengthen their potential goodness have always compelled religions to address the fundamental ethical question of how we should live. An engagement with politics is not a perversion or distortion of religion, but is a necessary obligation within all faiths. It is the nature of that engagement which is in question.

Where the teachings of the Church and the demands of citizenship converge is in the shared ideal that the human being has a moral status. There are things that should not be done to people. At the most general level, oppression and exploitation can be seen as wrong by citizenship and faith traditions. It is around the idea of protecting the moral status of each person as an equal partner in society that the two great moral traditions of European civilisation can converge in pursuit of this common good.

Maurice Glasman is senior lecturer in political theory at London Metropolitan University and author of Unnecessary Suffering (1995).