Down with la laïcité — to beat Islamism, we need a secularism that encourages religion

‘We are avenging the Prophet Muhammad’ shouts the jihadi murderer as he escapes, having killed 12 at Charlie Hebdo. In Syria, an American fighting for al-Qaeda says: ‘I want to rest in the afterlife, in heaven. There is nothing here’.

There are thousands of young men and women in our midst who share these sentiments. They believe that their cause is worth dying for – and they want to have that honour, confident in the reward that they will get for their actions. They are disillusioned, not disenfranchised. Many are well-educated, with a good family life. But they seek a value that they can fight for – a cause for which they can die.

There is the sense that in the west – to quote Jimmy Porter – there ‘aren’t any good, brave causes left’. Western values are vacuous, adrift without root or anchor. The eternal has been lost, replaced by the individual and the material, seeking maximum gain for minimum effort.