The challenges of the future might be overcome by looking to the Christian values of Britain’s past, a new Tory MP has said.

Devizes MP Danny Kruger, a former aide to Boris Johnson and former chief speechwriter to David Cameron, said Christian ideas are “losing their purchase” in Britain and we need a “set of values and beliefs to guide us” through modern times.

Giving his maiden speech in the Commons, he said: “I want to finish on a more abstract issue but I think it’s one that we’re going to find ourselves debating in many different forms in this Parliament.

“It’s the issue of identity, of who we are, both as individuals and in relation to each other.

“Traditionally we had a sense of this.

“We are children of God, fallen but redeemed, capable of great wrong but capable of great virtue.

“And even for those that didn’t believe in God there was a sense that our country is rooted in Christianity, that our liberties derive from the Christian idea of absolute human dignity.

“And today these ideas are losing their purchase.

“So we are trying to find a new set of values to guide us, a new language of rights and wrongs, and a new idea of identity, based not on our universal inner value, or on our membership of a common culture, but on our particular differences.

“And I state this as neutrally as I can because I know that good people are trying hard to make a better world, and I know that Christianity in the Western past is badly stained by violence and injustice.

“But I’m not sure we should so casually throw away the inheritance of our culture.

“There is so much to be positive about, I share the Prime Minister’s exuberant optimism about the future, but we need a set of values and beliefs to guide us.”

He added: “As we advance at speed into a bewildering world where we are forced to ask the most profound questions about the limits of autonomy and what it means to be human, we may have reasons to look about for the old ways and seek wisdom in the old ideas which are in my view entirely timeless.”