Tolstoy’s War and Peace is well over a thousand pages. And the BBC has been criticised for whittling it down into a mere six episodes. So it’s obviously ridiculous to try and summarise such a whopping doorstopper in three short sentences. But seeing as Tolstoy believed there was quite a lot to be said for foolishness, here goes: all Christians are fools. Politicians can’t allow themselves to look or behave like fools. Therefore, politicians cannot be Christian.

No wonder the Russian Orthodox church excommunicated him in 1901. He was a thorn in the side of organised religion and, even more so, a vigorous opponent of the state. For Tolstoy, the state was one great big protection racket, a monopoly of organised violence demanding money for a false promise of security. For by the raising of armies its citizens organise for war and yet also make themselves a target for attack. Thus the Christian state is a contradiction in terms. Not that you’d know it from the BBC’s bodice-ripping adaptation, but War and Peace is an extended argument for that most foolish of moral wisdom: pacifism.

Tolstoy’s Christianity was unusual. He didn’t care for the creeds or doctrines of the church, nor for its supernaturalism, nor for what he saw as the hypocrisy of its self-satisfied practitioners. Nonetheless, as “a theory of life” he believed the Sermon on the Mount could not be bettered. Not only are Christians called to love their enemies, but even more challengingly, to “resist not the evil person”.

He believed non-violence the absolute core of the Gospel, directly influencing Gandhi (with whom he corresponded) and Martin Luther King. And because Tolstoy believed the state to be an intrinsically violent institution, he concluded that the Gospel implies anarchism. Thus it becomes our duty at all times to undermine the moral standing of the state.

But can you imagine the archbishop of Canterbury using his pulpit to tell the congregation that they must love Islamic State. Or that the Taliban are not to be resisted? Or can you imagine the cardinal archbishop raising two fingers to the flag? They would be pelted with rotten fruit in every leader column in the country – including the Guardian’s. Yet Tolstoy reminds us that to be a Christian is to be a fool and a social outcast, that anyone who wishes to follow Christ has to be prepared to die as an enemy of the state, nailed to the cross. It’s a little bit more than a few verses of Shine, Jesus, Shine on a Sunday morning.

So don’t think of War and Peace as just some Russian Downton Abbey, full of distracting eye-candy. Not that Tolstoy was averse to the sins of the flesh. Like Count Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace – who is a thinly veiled self-portrait of Tolstoy himself – his pilgrim’s progress begins in the brothel, and proceeds via a commitment to religious organisations (in War and Peace, the Christian ritualism of Masons) to a simple inner commitment to the will of God. This faith only has one commandment: love God and love one other – yes, that’s only one commandment because the latter is a consequence of the former. And this commandment will get you into trouble.

For Tolstoy, as for Count Bezukhov, the spiritual journey is littered with mistakes and wrong turns. But what Bezukhov instinctively gets is the hypnotic power of the state and its ability to send men to war in a trance. We are bewitched by all the fancy uniforms, all the fear-mongering about security, all the insistence on our own moral virtue, all the bullshit about glory and honour. Be it Isis or Napoleon, the hypnosis is transferable.

Maybe Jeremy Corbyn has something of the Count Bezukhov about him. That’s why he will always have my respect. And, for the same reason, that’s why he may never be prime minister – though we can live in hope. For the fool sees things the wise person never can.

@giles_fraser