The most bogan of us have been touched by the centuries-deep richness of British ritual and reverence this past fortnight. We have been given a glimpse of that exotic land, the Christian past, where people are different; and a poignant sense that the present might be missing something.

It is a platitude that politics is downstream of culture, and culture is downstream of religion – where ‘religion’ means the prevailing structure of meaning that binds a community and shapes its character.