Michael Gove’s right, of course. It is time these words appeared somewhere in the Guardian, and his defence of Christianity in the Spectator provides an excellent opportunity. Christianity, he says, is now regarded in England with condescension or dismissal when not with active hostility. To say that you are a Christian is “to declare yourself intolerant, naive, superstitious and backward”.

This is obviously true, as anyone who reads the comments here knows. Muslims are undoubtedly less popular and more reviled than Christians, but it is a safe general assumption that anyone who claims their actions are informed by Christian principles will be assumed to be arguing from false premises and self-interest veiled by self-deception. If there is any moral reasoning involved, as Gove says, Christian belief is considered an actively disabling factor.

“Where once politicians who were considering matters of life and death might have been thought to be helped in their decision-making by Christian thinking – by reflecting on the tradition of Augustine and Aquinas, by applying the subtle tests of just-war doctrine – now Christianity means the banal morality of the fairy tale and genuflection before a sky pixie’s simplicities,” writes Gove.

Even my quite exceptionally level-headed friend Francis Spufford opens his book, Unapologetic, with the reflection that his daughter’s friends will think she’s weird for being a Christian, and he lives in a part of the country where people do still go to church in reasonable numbers.

The Book of Common Prayer will never again be a book of common prayer

Religion has become a toxic brand, and by “religion”, people mean something quite like the Christianity that was taken for granted 100 years ago. It now written off as obscurantist, authoritarian, and largely concerned with stopping anyone, ever, having any fun in bed.

It may be that this situation is not going to change.

Whose fault is this? Some of it is down to organised secularism and anti-theism. Richard Dawkins banging on about “faith-heads” must have done something to discredit Christianity with people who have never thought about it. The campaigning against faith schools makes Christianity seem unjust and decisive, at least to parents who would like to get their children into one and have failed.

Some is down to the churches themselves. In the past 30 years they have managed to place themselves with astonishingly consistent clumsiness, athwart of the prevailing currents of moral sympathy. This is not because individual Christians have been cruel or bigoted or hypocritical – though of course some have been – but because the mainstream denominations have carried on as if the laity did what the clergy told them at a time when that kind of deference was fading everywhere. By agonising in the belief that the opinions of the clergy had special moral weight, the churches managed to make their opinions completely irrelevant, and visible only when they were absurd.

This is amplified by a natural process of media hostility: we notice what’s unusual. That is why we write about child abuse, or resistance to contraception, or homophobia. They stand out against the moral instincts of the age, whereas the stuff about loving your neighbour is generally accepted and honoured (at least in the breach) and so not newsworthy.

But the real problem is the slow drift of religion into a category separate from the rest of life and thought. Religions that work have nothing to do with faith: they are about habit and practice, and the things that everybody knows. Gove quotes the Book of Common Prayer, which I also was brought up on, and love deeply. But it’s gone now. It will never again be a book of common prayer. The more that any religion becomes distinct from the culture around it, the weaker and weirder it becomes. Of course it can flourish as an embattled and angry sect. But Christianity in England has not been like that for at least 1,000 years. Seventy years ago, TS Eliot could write that dogs and horses were part of English religion, as much as bishops were part of English culture.

That’s now very much less true, and it’s hard to imagine a conservatism that could ever bring it back.