I CAN only feel for those children who are to take part in HumanLight on 23 December, a secular holiday established by the New Jersey Humanist Network in 2001. I was brought up secular, too.

My mother was a comprehensive secularist: she regarded anything that did not contribute directly to material well-being as childish, superstitious, and wasteful. She would not have approved of HumanLight, though, because she did not recognise any holidays: one day was the same as any other, and anyone who thought otherwise was just superstitious. Worse, holidays tempted people to take vacations - a pure waste, because they produced no lasting material results. You had to have "something to show" for any expenditure.

My mother regarded religion as the quintessence of all things foolish and wasteful: holidays, ceremonies, and superstition. Religion was, at best, a "crutch", understandable in old people facing death, but - the mantra still echoes in my head - who ever heard of a child being interested in such things?

I was fascinated by everything that my mother's vision of the world excluded as "impractical", which I saw as interesting, sexy, and fun. As a child, I peeked into the open doors of churches, too shy to go in. I read everything I could about mysticism, and tried the Jesus Prayer, seeking out what I thought of as "spookiness". And as surely as fundamentalist children become militant atheists, I, at an early age, became an Anglo-Catholic.

I have an icon corner in my dining room, where I burn an oil lamp in front of saints' images. I maintain the website for the American branch of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament. I have more prayer books than I can count, and, in the shower, sing mass settings and Te Deums in Latin.

Last December, the media were full of advice by child-rearing experts on how to give children the holiday experience without bringing God into it. Earnest secular parents debated whether Christmas could be detoxified, or should be replaced with some approved secular substitute. Clearly, religion was poisoned for them. I suppose that they saw it as a system of rules for belief and behaviour, wrapped up with parental authority and social control - very different from my childhood experience of religion as forbidden, sexy, and fun.

Religion is dying out. The United States, although still behind the curve, is catching up with secular Europe. We are heading for the "world come of age" that Dietrich Bonhoeffer predicted, where the "ordinary man spends his everyday life at work, and with his family, and of course with all kinds of hobbies", with no interest in religion or anything beyond the ordinary business of life.

But I suspect, or at least hope, that there will still be a minority who recognise the meagreness of everyday life and contingency of this world; who want to escape from ordinariness; who look for openings into another world that is more vivid, intense, and capacious - who crave ceremonies and sacred spaces.

It is a long shot, but perhaps when secularisation is complete, when the few church buildings left are museums, and Christianity is no more than a historical curiousity, religion will become, for residents of that bleak world, something exotic and spooky, with all the attraction of the outré and forbidden - as it was for me.

Dr Baber is Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego, California.