Christianity is at the heart of the secular left’s response to refugees

Say what you want about Owen Jones – and I might well agree with you – but he is admirably big-picture. He dares to link current affairs to the largest moral questions.

In a piece about refugees on Friday he supplied a sketch of his form of humanist idealism. Empathy, he explains, is a natural human faculty. We naturally desire the good of all our fellow humans – unless some nasty form of politics interferes with this and teaches us to view some group as less than fully human. This is what colonialism did, and what Nazism did, and what Balkan nationalism did, and what Islamic fanaticism is still doing. And it is what the right-wing press is doing, when it promotes a heartless attitude towards refugees.

‘As social neuroscientist Professor Tania Singer puts it, a “natural capacity for empathic resonance can easily be blocked – not just in psychopaths – but in all of us: simply because we think someone was unfair or is not belonging to ‘our tribe’”.’