Earlier this month, Britain's Archbishop of York lamented that he would be hard-pushed to describe Britain as a Christian country any more. A week later, a study published by the British Economic and Social Research Council found that Britain's big cities were "godless places". "Whatever people are doing about God," the researchers concluded, "they don't do it in church. Urban culture encourages people who are doing their own thing."

The truth is that Europeans clearly have begun to take pride in "doing their own thing". In a world characterised by an apparent "clash of fundamentalisms" - between American evangelical Protestantism, underwritten by the presidency of George W. Bush, and a vibrant new strain of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East - many Europeans like to think of their own region as a secular oasis.