Australians seem strangely unwilling to call out the blasphemies against their secular faith, including Christmas, writes Michael Jensen.

This present age is an age of such spiritual inertia and cowardice that we don't even believe in our own unbelief.

We haven't the courage of our secularist convictions. Churches are still afforded protection by the law. Christian organisations are still exempted from all kinds of discrimination laws and given multi-million dollar tax breaks. Church schools receive government funding. We let Christians hold us to ransom on euthanasia laws and genetic engineering. And yet, most of us never go within cooee of the church (unless someone carks it, or gets hitched - and even then, probably not).

So passionless are we that we think we can repudiate the Christian church and yet cling to the bland middle-class morality called Christian 'values'. This is a morality for the gutless, with its thoughtless (and godless) worship of hard work and the nuclear family. 'Working families', and all that guff.

So mindlessly nostalgic are we that we have forgotten to scrape off the sticky residues of Christian belief. In a recent survey published by the Centre for Public Christianity, it was discovered that 45 per cent of people who don't identify as "born again" still believe that Jesus rose from the dead! If this is really so, why are so many people sleeping in on Sunday mornings when they think that there is another world to prepare for?

Most of us - even the professed atheists among us - still hold to the essentially Christian teaching that human beings are special. But we have no idea why we think it, other than that it is convenient. The atheist philosopher John Gray, of the London School of Economics, writes that "contemporary atheism is a Christian heresy that differs from earlier heresies chiefly in its intellectual crudity". An atheistic humanism, he says, is plainly ridiculous. If unbelievers are going to embrace their unbelief, they had better leave such vestiges of Christian faith behind.

We are still happy to let Christian churches pick up the slack of our welfare programs, and let them do a large proportion of our educating and our health services. Are there no secular reasons to be committed to these things? Is it only those with views we consider pre-modern and pre-scientific that believe in community?

And we still want the holidays. We can't yet rid ourselves of these unnecessary and inconvenient reminders of all that we have left behind us. We have to keep celebrating the birth of the Christian saviour because some of us can't get around to finally affirming that we don't want to. Can't we at least be consistent?

The unbelief of Australians is better described as non-belief. It has nothing to do with informed opinion. It is just couch-potato stuff, unthinkingly inherited from our parents. It has nothing to do with careful consideration of the claims of the faith we reject, let's face it. I am sure we can find other more meaningful excuses for a summer break. How about "When You're Dead You're Dead Day"? Or "Phillip Adams Day"?

These are blasphemies against our secular faith. There are in Christianity shocking contradictions of all we hold most dear as a community. We ought to live out the meaning of our unbelieving creed and have done with it all - at least for consistency's sake. We ought to protect our public space from such blather - if that's what we think it is - and do so with all the vigour we can muster.

Rev Dr Michael Jensen is the rector at St Mark's Anglican Church, Darling Point and the author of My God, My God: Is it Possible to Believe Anymore? View his full profile here.