In today's Daily Telegraph, Michael Burleigh writes ...

The commercial success of Richard Dawkins's God Delusion may perhaps be owing to readers in Utah keen to burn it. However, it surely also signifies the mobilisation of local secular opinion around his double helix-emblazoned standard.

Because Britain has suffered less from anti-clericalism than continental Europe, much of the argument about faith in this country is of the God-bothering variety. However, there are worrying signs that this quaint Victorian-style debate between dons in tweed and men of the cloth is having a wider impact.

A poll published today by the new think tank Theos reveals public confusion. If 42 per cent of a thousand adults agree with Dawkins that religion is like "the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate", 53 per cent claim that "religion is a force for good in society", with a slightly higher percentage agreeing that Christianity had an important role to play in public affairs.

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