It is a funny old world, if you dare to laugh at it. Who could have predicted that, six years after the events of September 11 2001, America would have its own religious wars on its own soil – and they would have nothing to do with Islam? Instead, Christianity is the casus belli and cinema the new battleground.

Every fresh event-film today seems to come with a rattling of ecclesiastical sabres, even when the Hollywood studios themselves try to wave a white flag. Supersensitive to charges of blasphemy – and probably increasingly suspicious of British authors from J.K. “Dumbledore is gay” Rowling to too-devout-to-be-true C.S. Lewis to pagan folklorist J.R.R. Tolkien – Tinseltown’s department of homeland security, spirituality division, is on a permanent state of red alert.