Almost daily stories of conflict and anger call into question the eccentric, muddled British way of balancing faith and the state. Last week we saw a Muslim teacher taking a Church of England school to an employment tribunal over her right to wear the veil, the education department calling on academics to spy on potential extremists among their students and faith schools lining up to resist taking in government quotas of non-believers.

It was, in spiritually torn Britain, a pretty average week.

“Religion and politics is the issue of the next 50 years,” says the historian Michael Burleigh, author of the newly published Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al-Qaeda. “The closest parallel with the situation in Britain now would be the conflicts between Anglicans and Puritans over religious ‘enthusiasm’ in the 17th century.” Can a state, with both an established church and a tradition of evenhandedness, sustain itself against the growing demands of fundamentalist religion? Or would Britain be better able to weather the tensions of religious diversity if — like France and America — it created a clear divide between government and church and became a formally secular state? One view is that our established church, the Church of England, underpins Britain’s character as a tolerant but essentially Christian nation and that we should use it and its benign character and traditions as a bulwark against home-grown terrorism and the intensifying “clash of civilisations”.

On the other hand, religion may be precisely the problem. The CofE may be benign but its establishment encourages other, more extreme, religious groups to demand the same privileges, rights and favours of the state. The only equitable answer, say the secularists, is to turn the way of France and America and cleanse public life of all contact with faith and superstition.

Few think we can do nothing. As several new books make clear, from the street to the university, a furious debate about religion is involving us all. Professor Richard Dawkins, champion of Darwinism, has been spurred by the rise of religious fundamentalists to write The God Delusion, an “attack on God in all his forms”. Dawkins wants to take religion not just out of the state but society — and his book has become a bestseller.

“If this book works as I intend,” he writes in his preface, “religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.”

Politicians are manoeuvring desperately to use and confront these social convulsions. John Reid, the home secretary, was howled down last month when he said Muslim parents should watch for signs of extremism in their children. Jack Straw started a fire that still burns when he suggested the veil was, potentially, antisocial.

But this is about much more than mere politics. There was real blood spilled on 7/7, and real bitterness is involved in the arguments over faith schools and the veil in particular. Deep sensitivities have been inflamed. Britain is in the midst of a religious controversy unlike any seen for 300 years.

So is it time for Britain, as a state, to turn secular?

FEW can doubt that what we have now is an eccentric muddle. We have a head of state who is also head of the established church. Both houses of parliament begin every day with Christian prayers and the House of Lords is the only legislature in the world where Christian bishops — 26 of them — have full voting rights.

And yet we are widely regarded as one of the least religious countries in the world with fewer than 8% of us going to church. Less than half of us are even aware that Easter is about the death of Christ.

Even the official church is regarded by many as virtually an agnostic organisation. It is seen as simply a handy, traditional way of marking the rites of life’s passage. As such, it tends to be more tolerated when it is not overtly religious.

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