‘We don’t do God,” announced atheist Alastair Campbell on behalf of his believer boss, Tony Blair.

“When people stop believing in God,” said GK Chesterton, “they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.”

Campbell was, of course, wrong and Chesterton was, naturally, right. The British do now believe in anything and this week Blair “did God” to the extent of turning up at a church in south London to discuss faith — live and on the web — with Steve Chalke, Baptist and leader of the Faithworks movement.

Meanwhile, Michael Howard had made abortion an election issue and suddenly secular Britain found itself in the distinctly weird position of having to “do God”, of having to face the fact that, like it or not, the Big Guy is back.

These are, of course, tentative steps. Howard and Blair know perfectly well that playing the God card in the modern, know-nothing, believe-nothing UK is a high risk move that is likely to be met with blank stares from the masses. Fewer than 8% of us go to church, since 1968 the number who believe in God has fallen from 77% to 44% and the number who positively do not believe in God has soared from 11% to 44%. If secularity can be defined as the destruction of conventional religion then we are, indeed, a secular nation.

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, seems therefore to be right, though not for reasons that would make him particularly happy. Backing calls for a reform of the abortion law last week in this paper, he wrote: “The idea that raising the issues here is the first step towards a theocratic tyranny or a capitulation to some neanderthal Christian right is alarmist nonsense.”

Williams was acutely aware that politics and religion make a scary mix in the contemporary imagination. Either it produces Islamic terrorists or it inspires the faith-based campaigning of the Christian right in America and, ultimately, leaves abortion doctors gunned down outside their clinics.

Islamic theocracies consist, in theory at least, of 100% believers. In America 78% of people believe Jesus rose from the dead and 81% say they are Christians. More or less all of them believe in God and as many as half go to church every week. Constitutionally, religion is excluded from politics, but Americans say they are “one nation under God” and their dollar bills announce “In God we trust”. The US is a God-stricken nation and, as a result, He is employed as a senior campaign adviser to both parties.

In Britain we are not in that league, faithwise, and so our God-bothered leader must employ Atheist Ali as his adviser. Indeed, most of us haven’t a clue what any of this fuss is about. Last week a Reader’s Digest poll showed that only 48% of us know that Easter marks the death and resurrection of Christ.

Williams might have wanted to console us with the thought that we are too tolerant and liberal-minded to stumble into theocratic or neanderthal politics. The truth is we’re just too damned ignorant, both of the story and the concepts of the faith that forged our nation.

So what is going on here? Is religion really about to hijack the political agenda? Or is this just another hiccup in an increasingly desperate election campaign? Only a miserable 59% of us turned out last time. Are the big issues of life, death and God going to be the ones that fire us up to vote? The answers to all these questions are far more complex and strange than either the average atheist or believer can begin to imagine.

The first point to be clear about is that British secularism tends to blind us to reality. This late Christian cult — for that is what, at heart, it is — is based on a myth. This myth is that religion is just what people did before they had science to explain the world to them.

The sun rises in the morning, the stars wheel above us, flowers make themselves beautiful to attract insects and we have two legs to walk with. All of these things, to the prescientific imagination, were extraordinary mysteries only explained by the existence of a higher order of being. It is the only rational conclusion to draw.