Strident Secularism of Recent Years is Giving Way to Renewed Sense of Faith’s Importance to Life and Society

“Whatever its cause,” Richard Dawkins wrote in The God Delusion, perhaps the best-known recent literary assault on faith and religion, “Zeitgeist progression is more than enough to undermine the claim that we need God in order to be good.”

Indeed, the progressive trend being followed by an improbably large number of human beings is “unmistakable and it will continue”. Dawkins also argued that the God worshipped by Christians, Jews and Muslims is the worst kind of moral exemplar: jealous, murderous and unjust. He urged people to put their trust in humanity, impelled towards good by a “selfish gene” that can also engender altruism, while self-replicating cultural traits called “memes” leap from person to person in a similar, evolutionary way.

Dawkins was writing in 2006. That was before the economic crash, the migration crisis and a new wave of Islamist terrorism hatched a singularly un-progressive Zeitgeist that scorns the idea that humanity, though modernising in technological terms, is moving in any hopeful moral or social direction. That the quandaries of a disordered world and the alienation caused by displacement are forcing a reassessment of faith and religion is a reality trickling into the marrow of our secularised bones. Islamic and Hindu revivalisms have become titanic forces. Even Anglicanism, a strain of Christianity so unassuming it was said to have inoculated the English against religion, has a new lease of life. “Congregations are up in London,”…