Consider Christian leaders’ public political stances: anti-Brexit, pro-action on climate change, “anti-racist”, sceptical of border control, liberal on crime and punishment, and so on. Regardless of where you stand on these matters, it is hard to deny that, to the outsider, the churches’ political views look a lot like standard soft-Left politics laundered through the language and aesthetics of Christianity.

The faith often seems to have embraced a new mode of bourgeois respectability — not the old-fashioned kind, which was focused on keeping up appearances around dress and sexual propriety and social standing, but a new iteration, where correct political positions are the key to appearing Good. No wonder then if this all appears unattractive to those mystified or bored by the current preoccupations of the bourgeoisie.

It’s true also that many clergy have responded to the intellectual and scientific challenges of modernity by falling back on a sort of tactical ambiguity and vagueness about the Christian claims, to the point where it’s often not clear what, if anything, they stand for. This causes class division, as the more educated and intellectually inclined churchgoers are likely to find such obfuscation more tolerable and satisfactory than those who want clear, simple teaching. St Paul anticipated this problem, and staked out his belief in simple clarity, when he noted that “if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?”