This month’s Budget will be much more than a statement of where the economy is up to and how much the Government will spend on what. As with any Budget, it will also be an implicit statement of national identity, values and direction.

Similarly, people’s reactions to the Budget will reveal a lot about their personal identity, values and direction. It will be sad if all we ask is “What’s in it for me?” Yet much Budget comment amounts to little more than that.

A broader assessment is necessary. For, in the welter of financial tables, projections and analyses, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that government decisions on what we, as a nation, get and spend are expressions of deeper attitudes and values that are not financial at all. That becomes somewhat obscure when “the economy” is given an exalted life of its own, somehow divorced from the day-to-day life and aspirations of ordinary people.

Sometimes there’s an emphasis on how the economy might serve people – by making their lives more secure, for example, or opening up new opportunities, or building more wholesome communities. The focus during the neoliberal ascendancy seemed more narrowly focused on getting richer and protecting personal wealth, as if those were ends in themselves.

Such a change grew naturally out of a political climate in which people were encouraged to think less about the good of the wider community and more about private advantage. That in turn is fueled by the insatiable hunger for goods and services that characterises consumerism, as if the high road to happiness lies in how much we can buy.

Of course money is necessary to live in a modern society, but it is not the secret of a fulfilling life, any more than a nation’s wealth is an indication of its people’s wellbeing. It all depends how the wealth is employed, and whether it flows increasingly to the few, or is used to give greater security to the many.

These are questions close to the heart of the Judeo-Christian approach to life. A former Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, went so far as to describe Christianity as “the most avowedly materialist of all the great religions”.

Before Christianity, Jewish law prescribed rules that went way beyond moral exhortation to be good: there were laws against rigging the weights used on scales and against charging interest on loans to fellow Jews, a law to pay wages on the day they were earned, another to restore land to its ancestral owners every 50 years. Hebrew prophets condemned priests for carrying out their religious observances meticulously while being indifferent to the plight of the poor.

Jesus himself denounced those paragons of virtue, the Pharisees, for attending punctiliously to the minutiae of the religious law while neglecting “the weightier matters of justice, mercy and good faith”. Jesus spent most of his time moving among a peasant class for whom lack of food and crippling debt were constant anxieties, and it is no accident that the first concrete request in the prayer he taught was for enough bread, the second the forgiveness of debt. For him, God’s kingdom involves both.

Projecting that into the modern world, it is a sign of Godness in society when everyone is accorded those basic elements of security: enough money to buy food and pay the rent, and freedom from oppressive debt. No community can be considered wholesome if it lacks those elements. In today’s world one would have to add decent health care and housing. From Jesus’ perspective, the wealth of a nation is to be judged not by the size of its gross domestic product, but how that wealth is put to use.

In light of that, I wonder how future generations will regard the cost-accountant craziness that saddles students with debt (around $16 billion, with $1.6 billion overdue) at the very time they head towards major costs in buying their first home and establishing their families.

Earlier generations of students were spared that burden. In more enlightened countries they still are. “Forgive us our debts . . .?”

Social and human values are also inherent in decisions on health care, income support, education quality, childcare and a host of other programmes.

So as with any Budget, the one presented this month should be judged not solely by its financial data, but by what it sets out to achieve in human terms, what it implies about the kind of society it envisages, and the values implicit throughout.