Recovering the Common Good (Part One)

Recovering the Common Good (Part One)

Whatever Happened to “We”?

——

In a previous post I reflected on the demonstrations in Leeds and the polarisation of politics (See comments for the link) . They were simply notes in the margin—an attempt to think aloud rather than offer easy answers. I wasn’t trying to defend one political tribe against another. I was trying to understand why our common life feels so fractured.

I’ve found myself returning to that question over the last few weeks. The more I’ve sat with it, the more I’ve wondered whether political polarisation is really the presenting symptom rather than the underlying illness.

Perhaps what we’ve lost is something older, and deeper.

The common good.

It isn’t a phrase we hear very often. It can sound rather dusty, even a little ecclesiastical. Yet for centuries it sat at the heart of Christian thinking about public life. It was simply assumed that human beings flourish together or, eventually, not at all. My wellbeing is never entirely my own. It is tied up with yours. We inherit a society from those who came before us, we shape it by the lives we lead, and we pass it on to those who follow.

That way of thinking feels strangely unfamiliar now.

Perhaps one of the greatest losses in Britain today is not simply civility or trust.

It is the loss of moral ambition.

We still argue passionately about politics. We debate rights, identity and freedom with enormous energy. We campaign, protest and petition. None of that is unimportant. Rights matter, especially for those whose voices have too often been ignored.

But I sometimes wonder whether we have stopped asking a bigger question altogether.

What kind of people are we becoming together?

Somewhere along the way we forgot how to say ‘we.’

We became fluent in ‘me.’

I don’t say that as though I’m somehow standing outside the culture looking in. I’m as shaped by it as anyone else. Expressive individualism is simply the air we’ve breathed for decades. We are encouraged to discover ourselves, express ourselves, protect ourselves and pursue our own fulfilment. Politics often mirrors the same instinct. Every group seeks recognition. Every tribe protects its own interests. The language of rights becomes detached from the language of responsibility.

Freedom increasingly comes to mean, “Leave me alone.”

The Christian tradition has usually imagined something richer than that.

Freedom is not simply freedom from.

It is freedom for—for love, for service, for friendship, for worship, for the good of our neighbour.

Freedom reaches its fullest expression not in isolation but in communion.

When freedom is detached from responsibility, something slowly begins to unravel.

I wonder if that’s part of what we’re seeing around us.

There is an epidemic of loneliness. Families are under enormous pressure. Neighbourhoods often feel thinner than they once did. Fewer people know those living a few doors away. Public trust has ebbed away. Social media, for all its gifts, often rewards outrage more readily than wisdom, certainty more readily than curiosity.

We have become astonishingly connected.

Yet many people have never felt more alone.

Years ago, while studying theology, I first came across the language of the common good through Catholic social teaching. If I’m honest, I didn’t really understand why it mattered. My instincts were shaped by evangelicalism. I assumed the Church’s task was evangelism and personal holiness. Questions about economics, politics, housing, work or the environment felt important enough, but somehow secondary.

Life has a habit of questioning the neat categories we inherit.

Years of ministry in Leeds, life alongside people on the margins, and waking up to the reality of climate breakdown gradually sent me back to those ideas. This time I wasn’t reading them as abstract theology. I was trying to make sense of the city I loved.

The books hadn’t changed.

I had.

Or perhaps my questions had.

I realised that I hadn’t become less evangelical. If anything, I had become more convinced that the Gospel really is good news.

The difference was that I had come to see the Kingdom of God as larger than the categories I had first been given.

The Kingdom begins with personal conversion. It always will. But it doesn’t stop there. It spills over into families, neighbourhoods and workplaces. It shapes how we use money, how we treat creation, how we welcome strangers and how we seek the welfare of the places where God has planted us.

The common good, then, is not a distraction from the Gospel.

It is one of its public consequences.

Once you begin to think that way, different questions emerge.

What makes a neighbourhood flourish?

How do we build communities where strangers become neighbours?

How do we order an economy so that work has dignity and those who are vulnerable are not simply discarded?

How do we care for creation without treating it as something merely to be consumed?

How do we disagree without contempt?

How do we leave our children and grandchildren a society that is more generous, more peaceful and more hopeful than the one we inherited?

I don’t imagine there are easy answers to those questions. They certainly won’t be solved by one political party, one ideology or one economic system. Nor should Christians imagine that we possess some simple blueprint for society.

But neither can we avoid asking them.

For Christians, this isn’t a fashionable new concern. It lies deep within our own tradition.

The prophet Jeremiah told God’s people to seek the welfare of the city. Jesus taught us to love our neighbour as ourselves. Paul the Apostle described the Church as one body, where the flourishing of each member is bound up with the flourishing of the whole.

The Gospel has always resisted the temptation to make the self the centre of the story.

Instead it calls us into a people.

A family.

A body.

A Kingdom.

Perhaps that is one of the Church’s gifts in this cultural moment.

Not because we possess all the answers—we don’t.

But because we remember a question that our society desperately needs to recover.

Not simply,

“What do I want?”

But,

“What kind of people are we becoming together?”

I have a suspicion that recovering the common good begins there.

In the next blog I want to explore why I believe the Church is uniquely placed to help answer that question—and why the waters of baptism may run deeper than every political tribe competing for our allegiance.

-Rev’d Jon Swales

July 2026