At the beginning of the twentieth century, with characteristic foresight G.K. Chesterton predicted that civilisation would find itself under threat from madmen. But the particular threat he had in mind was not that of the proverbial barbarians at the gates - in the form of, say, the "Muslim hoards" or Raspail's debauched armada of immigres. Rather, Chesterton warned against the madness of the materialist, who, by shrinking the cosmos and human experience to the limits of his desiccated reason, would in turn doom humanity to a shrunken, imaginatively impoverished existence.

"The madman is not the man who has lost his reason," Chesterton insisted. "The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason." It is this heedless, unmoored quality that makes the materialist view of the world at once grim and seductive, just to the extent that it flattens out complexity and renders all reality bare before reason's austere gaze. Everything is thus explicable within what Chesterton calls the insane simplicity of materialism's "clean and well-lit prison of one idea" - but its explanatory power comes at the expense of the transcendent Good, the sublime in and of nature, the irreducible depth of human experience. This is why, Chesterton concludes, "The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way."

The media is, of course, full of such lunatics. It courts them, fashions them, panders to them. Their maddening simplicity lends itself to the culture of complacent ignorance enshrined in the media and encouraged in its audience. In a triumph of bipartisan nihilism, madmen across the ideological spectrum - aided and abetted by their media patrons - have conspired to ensure that any matter of consequence, any topic requiring even a modicum of nuance, simply cannot be the subject of patient, sustained public conversation.

Instead, these often delicate matters are quickly buried 'neath the sheer tonnage of inane trivia and pseudo-intellectual thuggery that today constitute the popular press. This is nowhere more evident than when it comes to religion.

And this brings me to Andrew Bolt. Despite the near fetishistic obsession with him among the bunyip alumni (to crib Nick Cater's felicitous phrase), I do not regard Bolt as an especially egregious example of our present madness, but rather as a thoroughly representative instance of it. Indeed, I find myself in the somewhat discomfiting position of having been praised on a number of occasions by Bolt - though, I suspect that particular honour may well now be a thing of the past. He seemed to like my principled objection to Kevin Rudd's brand of conviction politics. He applauded my on air rebuke to Peter FitzSimons, whose philistine rants against religion had, I felt, gone unchecked for too long. He apparently finds me occasionally perceptive despite being a "man of the Left" (though I'm hardly that - of the Left, I mean) and even promoted me as the "tiniest crack in the ABC groupthink" (whatever that means).

But Bolt's latest diatribe against Waleed Aly - whose very presence, prominence even, in the Australian media is enough to give the most despondent among us hope - exemplifies everything that is wrong with the way that religion, and especially Islam, is presently handled in public debate. For this reason, I felt this particular display of madness ought not to go unanswered.

Using a rather hackneyed line of attack, even by his standards, Bolt condemns Aly's seeming reticence to use the descriptor "Islamic" for the grotesque melange of separatists, criminals, thugs and terrorists that have opportunistically huddled under the banner of Boko Haram and wrought chaos and death in northeast Nigeria over the last decade. For Bolt, the more recent abduction of nearly 300 schoolgirls makes Aly's sleight of hand all the more problematic. In fact, Bolt pronounces, it is yet further evidence that Aly is a "pet of the establishment Left," a "model moderate Muslim, used by the media to persuade us we have little to fear from Islam." His role, in other words, is to sanitise the public image of Islam, to reassure the credulous Left that Islam is basically benign and that Muslims represent little more than an exotic ornament about the neck of liberal multiculturalism. Thus consoled, those inner-city progressive types are free to drift back into their near permanent state of moral somnolescence.

What Bolt wants from Waleed Aly, it would seem, is the same maniacal lucidity that Abubakar Shekau exhibits. Without the slightest hesitation, the leader of Boko Haram can claim to speak in the name of God, invoking divine sanction for their wanton barbarism ("Allah says slaves are permitted in Islam ... I will sell [your girls] in the market, by Allah") and their practice of forced conversion ("these girls ... we have indeed liberated them ... [they] have become Muslims"). Moreover, Shekau can confidently enjoin "real Muslims" - namely, he says, those "who are following Salafism" - to fall in behind his death-worshipping pogrom against Christians and other Muslims in northern Nigeria. No ambiguity here, Bolt insists.

But that is precisely the problem. Boko Haram is, at best, a kind of bastard Salafism. Perhaps more accurately, it represents the still-born offspring of Salafist ahistorical restorationism and unprincipled political opportunism, on the one hand, and Wahhabist anti-intellectual supremacism, on the other. This corrupted and all-corrupting Salafabist hybrid (to use Khaled Abou El Fadl's neologism) has been aggressively disseminated and massively funded throughout the Muslim world - including Nigeria - by Saudi Arabia, who promote it, not as one expression or sect of Islam, but as Islam tout court. Such a claim can only be made, however, on the back of the Wahhabist rejection of the vast Islamic tradition of jurisprudential and moral reasoning, and in the wake of the disintegration of the traditional institutions of Islamic authority that historically identified and marginalised such heretical departures from Islamic teaching.

According to Abou El Fadl, these developments over the last half-century, along with the widespread nationalisation of religious endowments (awqaf) across the Muslim world, have occasioned:

"a descent into a condition of virtual anarchy with regard to the mechanisms of defining Islamic authenticity. It was not so much that no one could authoritatively speak for Islam, but that virtually every Muslim was suddenly considered to possess the requisite qualifications to become a representative and spokesperson for the Islamic tradition, and even shari'a law. This was primarily because the standards were set so low that a person who had a modest degree of knowledge of the Qur'an and the traditions of the Prophet was considered sufficiently qualified to authoritatively represent the shari'a, even if such a person was not familiar with the precedents and discourses of the interpretive communities of the past.

Consequently, persons - mostly engineers, medical doctors, and physical scientists - who were primarily self-taught, and whose knowledge of Islamic text and history was quite superficial, were able to position themselves as authorities on Islamic law and theology. Islamic law and theology became the extracurricular hobby of pamphlet readers and writers. As such, Islamic intellectual culture witnessed an unprecedented level of deterioration, as self-proclaimed and self-taught experts reduced the Islamic heritage to the least common denominator, which often amounted to engaging in crass generalizations about the nature of Islam, and the nature of the non-Muslim 'other'."

As a result, the conscientious humility, the devout hesitation before the inscrutability of the Divine that has so defined the Islamic intellectual tradition for more than fourteen hundred years, the studied attentiveness to the dynamic interplay between Qur'anic texts, historical circumstance and the aesthetics of Divine mercy bound up with the very concept of Islamic authority - these have all been largely substituted in our time for the authoritarian pronouncements of illiterates and despots, of hadith hurlers and idolaters. No ambiguity here, either.

It is not at all clear to me that Waleed Aly was being purposefully evasive in his description of Boko Haram. If anything, his attempt to characterise so impossibly diffuse and promiscuous an "organisation" suffered from too much detail. Moreover, he has rarely, if ever, proven reluctant to label a movement or an ideology "Islamist" as a properly sociological designation. But that is not what Andrew Bolt wanted from him. He wanted Aly directly to implicate Islam as constitutive of the identity and demands of Boko Haram, and thereby to hold up Boko Haram as somehow disclosing the truth of Islam: "is Islam a threat? What have we imported and what danger would we run by importing more?"

What Bolt wants, in other words, is for Aly to admit the "obvious": that Islam is defined by the conduct of those who purport to be Muslims. Like Chesterton's lunatic, the "obvious" explanation Bolt demands might explain a large number of things, to his mind at least, but it cannot explain them in a large way. It would be unconscionable - nay, idolatrous - to reduce the vast moral architecture and rich theological symmetries of Divine Instruction to the weakness and sometimes wickedness of Muslims. Or, as Abdal Hakim Murad wisely puts it, Muslims are Muslims because they practice Islam, not vice versa. Thus the Qur'an repeatedly warns that God's covenant with Muslims is no entitlement, but hangs on their preparedness to bear living witness to the beauty of Divine mercy and justice.

This line of theological reasoning will undoubtedly strike Andrew Bolt as far too ambiguous, much too complex for his "clean and well-lit prison of one idea" - namely, that Islam is evil. But the lunatic certainties and vulgar generalisations peddled by Bolt and his media confreres not only do violence to the lives and experience of others; as Chesterton foresaw, such lunacy also condemns us to an imaginatively impoverished existence, a cultural half-life. For without what Chesterton called "healthy hesitation and healthy complexity," we leave no space for the formation of the kind of moral grammar necessary for the identification and confession of idolatry, pride and malice in our own souls, and thus the opening of our lives to God and to others.

Can the maniacal clarity of Andrew Bolt or Peter FitzSimons or Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris - or Abubakar Shekau, for that matter - come close to producing the sort of deeply affective, searingly self-critical prayers we read in Khaled Abou El Fadl's theological masterpiece, Search for Beauty in Islam (the book which, to my mind, represents perhaps the closest modern analogue to St. Augustine's Confessions)?

"God, look at Your people! Look at those who have wrapped themselves in Your religion like a cloak of hypocrisy. Look - are they Your people? On their splattered banners, bombastic slogans, and rolling banter, do You see or hear beauty? Does their labor carry the fragrance of Your breath - do their acts resonate in mercy and bliss? Is the bliss of Your touch found in the misery of their follies? Can the agonies they spread, and the suffering they inflict possibly represent Divinity? ... No, they are not Your people for with certitude and conviction, I know that Your people are known by the love they earn, not by the hearts and minds they mutilate and burn, as they convince themselves that they are the bearers of Your majesty."

Yet without capacity to speak thus, to pray thus, we are condemned to the idolatrous isolation of our own ego, and cut off from that penitent, generous life in shared pursuit of mercy, charity and beauty. It has often seemed to me that what gives Waleed Aly's political and cultural analysis its incisiveness, its uncanny ability to expose that unacknowledged contradiction upon which an entire ideological edifice hangs, but without a hint of hubris, stems from the fact that he has learned to pray thus. If only Andrew Bolt understood this, he would realise that the danger posed by Aly is far more serious than if he merely represented some kind of covertly anti-Western Islamism with a human face: by learning to pray thus, Waleed Aly has learned to speak as though the greatest struggle is not against one's political enemies, but against the idolatry in one's own heart.

***

Abdal Hakim Murad once remarked, with biting concision, "The New Atheism is built on three pillars: human ego, priestly pederasty, and the Wahhabis of Mass Destruction." Like a once seemingly insuperable empire, the "New Atheism" itself has now all but collapsed from its own rapaciousness. It sought to conquer too many kingdoms too quickly, never realising that it had neither the philosophical underpinnings nor the imaginative resources to sustain itself amid the wastelands of late-modernity, until it was too late. Much like the mythical "spirit of Vatican II" (which never was), the "New Atheism" now exists only as a media epiphenomenon, an ambient irreligiosity that has mistaken visceral cynicism for a kind of professional virtue.

And yet there is no denying that Waleed Aly and I belong to the two religious traditions on account of whose hypocrisy "the name of God is blasphemed" throughout the West. The terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 and the torrent of revelations of clerical sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in the first half of 2002 produced the ideal conditions of possibility for the emergence of the stridently antitheistic rhetoric and materialist reductionism that would come to be synonymous with the "New Atheism."

I am at least consoled that, within the vast folds of the Islamic and Christian intellectual traditions, the inherent potential for repentance, reform and rebirth is always present, as the unending internal struggle to reflect the Divine beauty in common life goes on. But what resources, I wonder, exist within secular liberalism for the struggle against human ego?

Scott Stephens is the Religion & Ethics Editor for ABC Online.