Love is back. These words are announced on a poster on a bin just outside All Souls on the High Street in Oxford. All Souls – Oxford’s college with no students – is one of the city’s most admirable stands against the encroachment of the outside world. A laager of golden stone and spires in defiance of reality. Why, then, announce that love was back here? The fellows aren’t just unaware that it had gone away, they had in all likelihood never known it was there in the first place. The poster was one of many in Oxford that appeared just before Holy Week. They were exhortations not to fumble around in an academic gown, but rather to join in mass protest; to mobilise and motivate against the threat – also presumably ‘back’ – by the political right; to show that those who want to march to ‘save the West’ by a reassertion of traditional values were wrong – and that what is worth saving about the West, or rather worth proclaiming about humanity, is its commitment to empathy and kindness. Or, in other words, ‘love’.

I don’t suspect it garnered much traction. Despite being a city filled with people prepared to talk at length about the barricades, Oxford’s last real taste of mass participatory violence was the St Scholastica’s Day massacre in 1355. And that, though dressed up as a ‘town versus gown’ fight, was really a glorified pub brawl about the serving of substandard beer. This ignorance of the political has historically served Oxford well. It has generally sought to present itself as a city where the intrusion of such petty, transitory things as politics and economics were at best vulgar and at worst sacrilege. This attitude is now changing, and not just by the medium of posters on bins. The university has consecrated new ‘schools’ to Business and Government, while bundling ‘the humanities’– as if they were some coherent but inconvenient whole – into a purpose-built centre.

This is a shame, not least because the city and university have had quite a lot to say about more important things – those things that have actually shaped the thought and practice of the public sphere in the West, which is now, if bins are to be believed, under threat. It has been a place where philosophy, art, music, literature, poetry and above all religion have been accorded their proper, higher places over politics and economics. The physical make-up of the city still bears witness to this, even if the pervading culture of the university does not. Everywhere one looks in Oxford there is Christ. His name, his image, his cross. Indeed, he is so present that some have forgotten that he is there.

There have been much publicised efforts in the West to reassert the presence of Christ in the public sphere. Counter protests like ‘Love is Back’ seem designed to push back at such attempts. Ironically, they are products of an entirely Christianised way of thinking about what love is. The love advertised as being back is for neighbour, stranger and outcast. These concepts did not spring, like fully formed Venuses, from the foam of the brains of Gen Z. Put another way, Love being back does rather, pace the imagined fellows of All Souls, beg the question where love first came from and how it went away. Unsurprisingly, Christianity’s answer to this is rather simple – it points to Christ.

One of the most beautiful and frustrating things about the Resurrection is that believing it to be true means it becomes everything. Indeed, it becomes impossible to see anything but through its lens and by its light. The resurgent love of God and the redemption of creation becomes for the Christian the only way in which the underlying principles that make up civil society become intelligible. That the former – the love of God – has been rejected or forgotten  perhaps explains why the latter – civil society – seems to frayed. Yet there is a double irony here, because believing in the Resurrection also means that nothing matters as much as it does. It is this tension that underlies much that is creative and much which is deadly in the relationship between Church and State.

Consequently, it becomes true to say that Christianity underpins everything that matters and that love should trump all other allegiances. Indeed, it is only possible to understand both how the West has historically propagated what it thinks of as right and good and true, and how it seeks to unpick its past, through the lens of an explicitly Christian understanding of love. This is how the resurrection can be the motivating story behind both sides that march to reclaim the public square. Gently, however, one might suggest that – while shouting ‘Christ is King’ in one direction and that ‘Love is Back’ in the other represents a remarkable testament to the reality of Christ in the political sphere – it is not to marching or shouting that Easter calls the Christian. It is instead a summons to watching, waiting, to quiet awe and surprising joy that Easter calls the one who wants to know what love is. Billions will hear those gentle, earth-shaking words: ‘Early in the morning, on the first day of the week.’ They will hear them, and – crucially – believe wholeheartedly that what follows them is true.

For those who truly want to save the West, they must start with the Resurrection not as myth or as place-holder, but as a fundamental truth. Love is not fuzzy in the Easter story but has blood and flesh and bones. Holy Week and Easter are impossible to fully experience without enfleshment, for it is that which makes them both so difficult for some to believe but also so convincing. It is also Christianity’s belief in transformed flesh that has undergirded the Christian foundations of Western Civilisation and which has entirely shaped the secular understanding of what love in the public sphere – or in private life – might look like. Indeed, without the Resurrection any attempt to talk about the triumph of Christ, whether as lover or as king, over the ways of the world falls into the realm of the platitudinous or the venomous. The Resurrection of Christ tethers love in faith and tethers faith in love.

There is much discussion of Christ, much invocation of what he might do or think or say were he to be among us now. Such prognostication always comes across as odd and unconvincing, mostly because it is so unnecessary. All those people who want to know what Christ might do need only to go to church this Easter and see what his followers continue to do and to proclaim. Perhaps this is why politics and economics struggle so much with Christianity: it defies the vanity of thinking exclusively in the primacy of the present. Easter is the time when Christianity proclaims what was done, what is and what will be, when it makes clear that love is back, never to go away again.