There is no way of telling how many prospective doctors and medical students watched The Hospital on Tuesday night, but we should, for all our sakes, pray it was a low number.

The first part of Channel 4's fly-on-the-wall series, which runs for another two weeks, looked into the modern world of emergency medicine. This wasn't ER or Scrubs, this was ugly reality - wave upon wave of young people, drunk, regardless, violent and rude, brought in with various terrible injuries as a result of intoxication.

It was some of the most powerful documentary television I've seen: the young people were both victims and propagators of alcoholic mayhem; the doctors were dead-eyed, high-pay-grade streetsweepers.

We would be sensible to regard it as a modern morality play, especially in a week when the National Secular Society called for the NHS to stop funding hospital chaplains. The society estimates that £40 million a year is spent on giving religious groups a presence in hospitals. In many areas secularism has much to recommend it. In this instance they are wrong and mean-spirited. There has never been a greater need for a spiritual presence in hospitals.

What was so interesting about The Hospital, apart from its shock appeal, was the moral landscape it painted of our society. Here was a stage, you realised, where everyone had become brutalised. The patients showed a total lack of responsibility for their actions. They swore at staff, they smirked, they were abusive, complaining, obstructive, hysterical and completely unapologetic. As for gratitude, why, it's a free service, isn't it? What's to be grateful for? There was an almost total lack of the embarrassment or thanks that former generations would have displayed.

Even when approached, sober, for their reflections they were not given to remorse. Rather they were insouciant. Danielle, a 19-year-old mother of two, who had arrived at A&E after being trapped under a taxi, her shattered legs bent up over her shoulder, was oblivious of any moral subtext. After she had spent a month in hospital she was asked if she had paid a high price for her drinking. Nah, she joked, I only spent £20 and got a free taxi.

Equally you could see the impact on the battle-fatigued staff. Like military mercenaries, their moral values had either ceased to exist or they had been buttoned away for fear of revealing disgust.

I've encountered exactly the same dead eyes in big city A&E departments. Once, at one of these hospitals, notorious for dealing with relentless violence and knife crime, I attended my child who had been rushed there with a suspected neck injury. Fortunately it turned out just to be a torn muscle, but I found it an unnerving experience, and not for the obvious reason.

The doctor, a young man with empty eyes and a hard-drinking face, did not engage with us. He spoke as if we were five miles away. For all he was utterly professional and faultless, I felt as if something had died inside him. He was almost like an addict: I wondered if he was so hooked on the adrenalin of coping with stab wounds and fights that nothing less than that stirred him.

You see the same look in abbatoir workers' eyes. They shut down all feeling, all judgment. The patients, deserving or not, have become lumps of meat to them. Monica Garnsey, the maker of the documentaries, believes that what patients want most is the sense that their doctor is sympathetic. But their patience has been stretched too far.

So maybe a little moral panic would be a good thing; maybe we need more chaplains, if only to check the growth in this new amoral, compassion-neutral transaction, where the drunk and feckless not only waste billions of pounds but leave hospital as ignorant and unreformed as they went in. Maybe we need to be a bit more judgmental, for all our sakes.

In a world sometimes scarily lacking in values, chaplains have a vital symbolic role as well as a practical one. Chaplains, in my experience, do not proselytise; they simply afford patients the kind of time, care and compassion that medical staff can no longer give them. No, they cannot cure binge drinking, but they do stand for something resolutely good and wise.

The secularists have missed the point completely. They contacted 233 acute and mental health trusts, which spent £26.72 million on chaplains. This money, they say, could be used to employ 1,300 nurses or 2,645 cleaners, which is as facile as saying that we could save £3 billion plus in A&E budgets by banning booze. Terry Sanderson, the president of the society, even claimed that people in hospital should seek visits from their own vicar, priest, rabbi or imam if they needed religious support.

What an arrogant man he sounds. It is non-religious people, lost in a crisis, who need chaplains the most. Look at Jade Goody, married and blessed as she was dying. Look at the tragic, chaotic lives of some of the young people lying in A&E with no family to phone. It is the injured, the dying and the bereaved, who seek, not necessarily God, but a little kindness and succour at their time of greatest need.

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