The problem is that because Christianity is seen as part of the old order, part of the ‘conservative establishment’ that many people still delude themselves into thinking we have, it is therefore, for the left, fair game for attacking and demeaning.

Hence the recent abolition of the blasphemy laws, which was not about freedom of speech since no-one was being prosecuted by them anyway, but quite simply about openly attacking Christianity. As a few (noteworthy, but unfortunately few) Conservative MPs such as Edward Leigh said, the abolition would only send out a sign that being gratuitously offensive towards Christianity was acceptable – and was proved right when the National Secular Society announced it was organising a public recitation of the extremely offensive poem about homosexual acts at the Crucifixion (which was the subject of the last successful prosecution for blasphemy back in the 1960s), just because it could.

The Left actually couldn’t care less about ‘untangling misconceptions’ about Islam or indeed about religious freedom. For them, anything old and bound up with Britain’s ancient heritage invites derision, while anything foreign and antithetical to British tradition is to be welcomed. Their pious talk about religion is nothing less than thinly-veiled iconoclasm.