The controversy surrounding this week’s Lambeth Conference will be seen by some not simply as in-house fighting within the Anglican Communion, but as the final nail in the coffin of Christendom. For some, the ongoing debate over homosexuality marks a divergence between secular and biblical worldviews that cannot easily be reconciled.

Extremism. Irrelevance. The twin evils set to destroy the public image and persona of religion worldwide. The first fuelled by minority elements amongst people of faith, and the second foisted upon religion by a majority of those of no faith, dismissing it as outmoded superstition.

Into the breach steps Tony Blair – as our newly appointed defender of the faiths. The former Prime Minister has set up a Faith Foundation whose goal is not just the nurture of harmony amongst different faiths and the eradication of extremism, but also the enlightenment of secular western society in regard to its debt to faith, past and present.

God, according to Alastair Campbell’s diaries, is a political ‘disaster area’.

‘British people are not like Americans,’ he wrote on 20 March 1996, who ‘seem to want their politicians banging the Bible the whole time.’ In Britain, by contrast, those ‘who didn't believe didn't want to hear it; and the ones who did felt the politicians who went on about it were doing it for the wrong reasons.’

This can be frustrating for those British Christians whose faith leads them into politics. But before we start yearning for a culture in which we can talk openly about God in public, we should read Jim Wallis.

‘People may be surprised but I hope that that surprise will be modified when they think about the general question of how the law and religious community – religious principle – are best and most fruitfully accommodated.’

It’s an uneasy time of year: the ghost of Christmas turkey past still haunts your waistline, the shriek of a multitude of battery-driven toys still assaults your ears and your feet are blistered and sore from foraging among the buy-one-get-one-frees.

Why would anyone become a Christian in Britain today?

Why, when God is dead, religion a cause of global conflict and the church inflexible, illiberal and irrelevant, would anyone in their right mind embrace the Christian faith?

There aren’t too many figures in the Christian world who are causing a stir right now. Some of us are probably relieved, having grown weary of personalities and ‘power ministries’. We don’t reach out to touch the screen of Christian TV, we reach out to turn it off.