Politics & Power Quote by George Carey

The phrase "get back" does the heavy lifting here: it sells faith not as a living tradition but as a rewind button. Carey frames Christianity as a national infrastructure project, something that once built America and England and can be reinstalled to restore lost strength. The insistence on "very strong" Christianity signals an anxiety about dilution - not just secularization, but pluralism, internal church liberalization, and the messy reality that modern publics no longer default to Christian authority.

"Christianity shaped America and England" is true in the broadest sense, yet strategically selective. It compresses centuries of conflict into a comforting origin story: Christianity as moral glue rather than as a field of contest over slavery, empire, class, and women's rights. That compression is the subtext: if the past is imagined as coherent and righteous, the present can be cast as drift, decadence, or betrayal. The line "moral foundations that made us great" borrows the rhetoric of civic renewal and funnels it into religious restoration, turning virtue into a national brand with a single supplier.

Context matters: a senior Anglican figure speaking in an era of declining church attendance and rising cultural fragmentation. The appeal is pastoral, but also political. It implicitly offers a solution to social unease - crime, family instability, cultural change - while sidestepping harder questions about economics, policy, and power. The rhetorical move is to treat morality as heritage, and heritage as destiny. If you can make people feel that they are losing their roots, you can make the call to "return" sound like common sense rather than a partisan program.