West's history not complete without reference to Christianity

No-one defined modern liberalism more than the 17th century philosopher John Locke. Locke's vision of the three basic natural rights - life, liberty and property - set the political agenda for three centuries. As did his arguments that all people are fundamentally equal, kings are just men, and power derives from the consent of the majority.

Locke came to these conclusions from an explicitly Christian mindset.

For Locke, humans are equal - men, women, workers, shopkeepers, peasants, kings, smart people, stupid people, the physically strong and the physically weak - because they are all capable of knowing God.

You don't need to agree with Locke's arguments. Neither do you need to believe human rights or equality are inherently religious concepts.

But as the philosopher Jeremy Waldron writes in his 2002 book God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke's Political Thought, "Secular theorists often assume that they know what a religious argument is like: they present it as a crude prescription from God, backed up with threat of hellfire, derived from general or particular revelation... With this image in mind, they think it obvious that religious argument should be excluded from public life".

Thus we get 'Captain Catholic', and the idea that teaching children some basic aspects of Christian thought is antithetical to secular democracy.

If the next generation is going to be taught history it should be taught good history. That means fully identifying the religious origins of modern society.

It means discussing how one short passage in the Bible ("give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's") put medieval Europe's church and state in opposition, and undermined the centralised authority characteristic of other civilisations.

It means recognising not just religious support for the Spanish conquest of the Americas, but the religious beliefs of those who also opposed it, like Francisco de Vitoria, Bartolomé de las Casas, and Antonio de Montesinos - three 16th century theologians who bitterly opposed the enslavement and abuse of Native Americans on Christian grounds.

And yes, it means teaching how devout people did great harm as well.

This secular defence of Christianity should not be taken too far.

While liberal democracy was conceived in a Christian framework, one obviously need not be Christian to be part of liberal democracy.