The inherent strength of religion cannot mask the fragility of Christian belief in Britain

Terry Eagleton, the Marxist literary critic, has been something of a hero of mine since the publication of his Reason, Faith and Revolution, a thoroughgoing demolition of the Richard Dawkins critique of religion – on the sound basis that Prof Dawkins didn’t know what he was talking about – and his latest, Culture and the Death of God, promises to be pretty good too.

He touched on it in an interview on the Today programme where he was excitedly introduced by Evan Davis as an atheist – ‘you are an atheist, aren’t you?’ – which was an odd sort of assumption to make about a man whose career began as a youthful contributor to a Leftish Catholic journal. The prof brushed this aside, but went on to make his fundamental point, that religion has, over time, trumped all the attempted substitutes: Reason (practically deified in the Enlightenment), Nature (ditto, by the Romantics), nationalism, and above all, culture, endowed by what passes for our own intelligentsia with all the ennobling effects of religion without the tiresome necessity of belief.