which secular britain hasn't woken up to yet

On Radio 4 they're trailing a program (airing tonight I think) where an intrepid journalist ventures into exotic communities of Religious Believers in the Inner Cities, to investigate a world of strongly held religious convictions, and the trailer ends with a comment along the lines that this is a phenomenon which secular Britain hasn't woken up to yet.

But I find this a slightly misleading description of the state of affairs. It makes it sound like "secular Britain" is the norm, the way it's always been, and creeping waves of religiosity are just starting to infiltrate this nonreligious society. They're completely avoiding the realisation that this isn't so much secular Britain as secularised Britain - dogmatic varieties of religion have had a long and respectable history here, and the cultural change which we've undergone isn't so much religion springing up as conventional religion dying out. The thing to wake up to is that when you do abandon that solid background of a national reformation of religion, then it's hardly surprising that all sorts of intellectual and spiritual oddities will spring up to fill the gap. As they say, when you decline to believe the truth, you don't just end up believing nothing, you'll believe anything.