Significantly, or perhaps predictably depending on your viewpoint, the leading 'new atheists', notably Dawkins and Sam Harris, are purveyors of a reactionary, reductionist biologism that naturalises an extremely savage neoliberal order, featuring the gene as a utility maximiser. That is their 'materialism', which they range against the claims of religion. (Hitchens merely duplicates this reductionism in his own bestselling addition to the God non-debate). The claims of evolutionary psychology have long fuelled reaction over gender, race and class, and have evidently provided a far more compelling narrative of the inevitability of patriarchy, inequality and bigotry than religious texts.

I note, with some satisfaction, that for all the theological ignorance of Dawkins et al (an ignorance which, I hasten to add, I share), they are at one with the fundamentalists on the stable meaning of religion and its texts.

Further, I don't accept the explanations of child rape within the Catholic church which attribute it to Catholic practises producing sexual repression - as if were priests allowed to marry, they would not be tempted to abuse boys from the laity. Sexual repression is regrettable in itself, but I doubt that it produces predatory child rapists. The rape of children typically takes place in institutions and situations where adults have too much unaccountable power over children - in children's homes, and in families, for example. The principle of patriarchy does not begin and end in church, and it does not operate in isolation from institutions of the body politic which demean, control, vilify and commodify children, the better to socialise them for a world in which they are commodities, the better to make them governable. If the Catholic church hierarchy is implicated in this scandal, this does not necessarily support the wider arguments of the 'new atheists' on religion, least of all their reductionist account of religion as a sole and sufficient cause of so many more ills than it can plausibly have produced, which we will come back to. Even so, on the face of it, it is quite sensible to protest against a pope with such a record.

That said, some left-wingers looked askance at the weekend's protest, and at the smug bourgeois secularists around 'Ditchkins'. For although the spectacle over the weekend was one of secular protest against theocratic patriarchy, the issue is saturated with meanings that extend well beyond this. This is, after all, a country with an established Anglican church. There is still a dominative Anglo-Saxon culture at work, whose supremacist posture was quite explicit not so very long ago. It is a country which still has an imperial relationship of sorts to Catholics in the north of Ireland, and where there is still a toxic residue of anti-Catholic bigotry - more than a residue in Scotland and Ulster. While I myself was never one of the 'Billy Boys', I was exposed to enough of this bigotry to know it when I see it. I also know imperial condescension when I see it - when I first came to England and found that people here believed that Northern Ireland was torn apart for thirty years or so because of religious sectarianism, because Prods didn't get on with Tims, I was shocked. And I was offended, as I still am when I think of it. When Dawkins et al repeat this ridiculous canard and apply the same logic, mutatis mutandis, to the explanation of the Israel-Palestine conflict (or worse, to the 'civil war' in Iraq), I know all too well that this isn't really about atheism, or secularism. It is about representing those who do not partake of the relative wealth and stability of the Anglophone imperial core as tribal-minded, bloodthirsty, backward idiots. We do not have conflicts based on rational interests, each making a claim to universalism, in which imperialist powers have weighed in on one side. We have petty, parochial struggles over atavistic ideas which are childish premonitions of modern, scientific truth claims, and where imperial power is invisible. Indeed, as Eagleton suggests, part of the whole basis of Dawkinsian befuddlement and outrage over religion is the feeling that things couldn't be so bad as to require a spiritual, much less messianic, solution. Class privilege benights its beneficiaries in this respect.