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When I began reporting on religion everyone assumed it was heading towards extinction, like God. Friends asked why I was going into a backwater. I had no answer, except a life of reading obtuse encyclicals and writing about it for The Times seemed like heaven to me. It was like that for a little while. For about five minutes. But it soon became apparent that this new world I'd gone into was no different from the "hard news" world I thought I'd left, it was just a lot more complicated. There was suicide, plotting, bitchiness, adultery, all the seven deadlies and more, occasionally finished off by forgiveness. And as I meditate on this today, the profile of religion as a whole has never been higher.

Even in the decade before 2001, the interest in religion was noticeably growing. The subject was moving up through the paper, from the old Court Page and even, sometimes, onto the front. Splashes became more frequent. The Pope was starting to be noticed in a new way. Whispers of his influence in engineering the downfall of communism in Eastern Europe were beginning to be heard. But the official line still seemed to be that God was dead, and religion soon would be. It suited me fine. I felt like a spy, a subversive. I enjoyed startling colleagues with occasional forays onto the front before disappearing back to forage for more news behind enemy lines.

The change has taken place on many levels. Now all manner of political stories, including the biggest story of the decade, 9/11, have a strong religious dimension.

It is a measure of the way the world has changed. It is counter-intuitive, especially for those children of the 1960s, for whom God and religion seemed to be towards the end of a slow death. Yet rumours of that death have been widely exaggerated. In this country, and in the US, declining attendance in the liberal wings of the Christian churches - chiefly the Anglican and Episcopal churches - has been more than offset by the increasing devotion of evangelicals, the increasing numbers of Muslims and the enormous influx of devout Catholics through immigration. Many religious stories today centre around issues such as religious dress in the workplace. They emerge from the radical divergence between different groups of believers, including secularists.

At the same time, we are seeing an opposite trend in our political arenas. There is a convergence as never before of the main political parties. This has meant that, whereas in the 1970s there were genuine confrontations in politics between left and right, today it is in the world of religion that we have the biggest conflicts. It is as if we are returning to a much earlier era, when wars of religion raged across the world.

The battles are taking place on many fronts. And the religionists have their own opposition as well. The agnostics and atheists, led by Richard Dawkins, are increasingly adapting the proselytising language of mission to get their own creed across.

It is strange, I think, that I now number Professor Dawkins, the National Secular Society and the British Humanist Association among my constituency. The problem for the rationalists, a problem they are going to have trouble overcoming because they do not understand it in any way, is that there is an unquenchable thirst for the transcendent and numinous in most of the human race. Like it or not, that is always going to be there and will find its expression in one form or another. There is no point in denying that, any more than there is in denying the findings of Copernicus.

Click here to read Dolan Cummings's response: Count me out of atheism's creed

A Battle of Ideas debate on "The resurrection of religion" will take place on Saturday, October 27 at 15.30

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Ruth Gledhill is Religion Correspondent for The Times and Times Online