THE Prime Minister’s article in the Church Times and his Easter Message to Christians in a video clip following an Easter reception at 10 Downing St represent a break with recent history.

Mr Cameron told Christians to be unashamedly evangelical in celebrating the fact that we are a Christian nation with enduring Christian values.

In recent years we have been more accustomed to Christianity being treated as something mildly embarrassing. And, even as a Christian nation, we shy away from supporting overtly Christian political parties.

Look across to the continent and in almost every other European country you will find Christian Democrats, Christian Social Unions and other similar dominant political parties. I think we are sensible to accept that, even within a Christian nation like our own, there are ways in which religion and politics do not mix well.

In Britain an explicitly Christian political party would have difficulty in agreeing a manifesto. The Bible does not lay out any obvious political programme or solutions to economic and social problems.

Any Christian political party would quickly take on the appearance of a narrow sect rather than a religion. It is much healthier that Christians support the political party that most closely represents their own individual outlook rather than attempt to form their own.

In our history, we have learned the hard way about the dangers of making too explicit a link between religious belief and political action. I rather think most of us are comfortable with the position we have arrived at, and regard zealots with a healthy mixture of suspicion and amusement. The real problem of mixing politics and religion, however, is no longer a predominantly Christian one: rather it is a problem that is dividing the Muslim world, including fuelling civil war in Syria, destabilising Pakistan and at the centre of the controversy engulfing schools in Birmingham. In every case most of the victims are Muslims themselves.

Islam is not a monolith: it is divided by complex differences and traditions as great as any that convulsed Christianity. To simplify, we might liken the divisions in Islam to aspects of the Reformation in 16th century Europe when reformed Protestant churches broke with mediaeval Catholicism. In Britain the principal strand of Muslim tradition has come from the Indian subcontinent and is heavily influenced by Barlevi and Sufi traditions. It is a gentle and mystical religion.

But in recent years we have witnessed a determined attempted “takeover” by a puritanical form of Islam as part of a deliberate missionary effort funded by Saudi Arabia.

This Wahhabi movement and its Salafi offshoots are the equivalent of the iconoclasts who stripped English churches of their pre-reformation effigies and our land of its many chantries and shrines. Like our own historical puritans, these puritanical Muslims are intolerant of diversity; for them there is only one pure form of Islam and it involves a strict return to the standards and life of the first generations of the faithful. We cannot be neutral observers in this battle of religious ideas within Islam because the Salafists are not only intolerant of diversity within their own religion, they are also intolerant of western values and, in particular, of liberty and democracy. While the creed is not necessarily a violent one, it is certainly much more prone to violence.

For this reason I think that Michael Gove was entirely right to pick a senior police officer with anti-terrorist experience as his commissioner to investigate what has been going on in the schools at the centre of the controversy in Birmingham.

It sends a powerful message about how seriously we take this stuff, and how we are determined to uphold the rights of Muslims to freedom of religion, just as we are determined to uphold the rights of Christians and everyone else.