This week past has not been one in which we in Britain could forget the counter-claims of religion and the secular state. A spate of comment - in which the Archbishop of Canterbury was much criticised for meddling in matters of religion - gave crushing victory to the secular state. If comforting, it left open the question that the religious commentator Clifford Longley plaintively put to the columnist Polly Toynbee ( The Moral Maze , BBC Radio 4, Wednesday) - what, in a secular state, is the test of morality? It is a matter at the heart of Dostoyevsky's mystical novel The Brothers Karamazov , in which the saintly Elder says that "if Christ's church did not exist, there would be nothing to restrain the criminal from his wrongdoing". For rapidly growing numbers of fellow humans, this is a real, urgent issue.

That religion is itself a real and urgent issue is becoming clear, even to those sons and daughters of Beelzebub, the makers of television programmes. The commissioning editor for religious programmes on Channel 4, Aquil Ahmed, said at a recent seminar I attended that he operated on the assumption that much of what happens in the world today cannot be understood unless the power of the religious impulse is recognised and explained: a belated statement of common sense.