WE MAY not know the minute or the hour, but one thing is certain about the Second Coming: Humanists UK will issue a press release saying it proves that the bishops must be taken out of the House of Lords. And they’ll probably be right, that time.

The humanists are not the only people for whom the census results prove that their message is needed more than ever. The Church of England is just as bad. For as far back as I can remember, every fresh statistic showing the decline of belief and observance has been greeted by a bishop explaining that Christianity is more needed than ever. It’s like the captain of the Titanic assuring us that one more heave will push that pesky iceberg out of the way.

This year the honour went to the Archbishop of York, who was not nearly as concise with his talking points as the humanists managed. Honourable mention goes to the Evangelical Alliance for boiling the good news — that they are right — down to one sentence: “Despite the decline shown in the latest census figures, practising Christians are essential to our society and fulfil a key role, says the Evangelical Alliance.”

The papers divided in their treatment much as you would expect. The Daily Mail thought the main story was not so much about non-religion as non-whiteness. To judge from the comments, “Christian” still codes for “white” to many readers. The Daily Telegraph gave eight paragraphs of reaction to the Archbishop of York and six to the humanist Andrew Copson. The Guardian gave two men two paragraphs each but led on the rise of non-Christian religions and had three more paragraphs of humanist/secular reaction lower down the story.

Since the paper has been reporting that “no religion” is the new default position among younger people for at least ten years now, it is curious that it has not moved on to explore what “no religion” actually means in practice.

The confidence with which the organised humanists speak for “no religion” is in its way quite as remarkable as the belief that there ought to be bishops in the House of Lords. If you go into the census statistics (available as an Excel sheet from the Office for National Statistics), you find that there are 58 possible religion categories the census measures. They run the gamut from Animism to Zoroastrianism, with some interesting minorities among them: 2500 Druids, 5000 Satanists, 271,000 Jews — and 22 million people who give their answer as “no religion”. How many of the “no religion” types identify as “humanists”, then? Twice as many as the Satanists: 10,225.

In the context of the 22 million people for whom they claim to speak, this is a rounding error — quite literally, since there are precisely 22,105,458 self-identified “no religion” people in the census.

The sublime confidence that they speak for all decent and right-thinking people seems to me the clearest way in which the humanists have simply inherited the mantle of the Church of England as it was 50 years ago. Since the broadsheet newspapers are still largely run by people whose parents would have gone to church from time to time, they find the humanist discourse entirely natural, and perhaps also a very comforting way of pretending that nothing very awful or important has changed in the world since then. Besides, the Humanists do put out a lot of press releases, which can be taken into copy almost verbatim.

Even so, their constant burbling on about prayers in Parliament or bishops in the Lords is rather like my bad habit of playing solitaire on the computer — a game the humanists can hope in time to win, but which has no relevance whatever to the outside world. It is absurd to suppose that the most urgent reform needed by a body which already contains Michelle Mone and Evgeny Lebedev is the expulsion of the Archbishop of York.

THE only point on which religious privilege really upsets the non-religious middle classes is the business of church schools. Competition among middle-class parents for good schools — which are defined as those which will maintain your children’s class position — is always going to be savage, especially in London. And the churches which run good schools are damned either way. It they try, as the Roman Catholics have done, to ensure that the schools serve the poor, their parents get furious when they get their children in. If they try instead to cream off the most academically able, they are attacked with equal vigour by everyone who fails to get a child in. The present system of competition ensures that this would be the attitude to any identifiable chain of schools, whether or not they were run on religious lines.

This would be the moment to point out that Bishop Peter Hullah, a former headmaster of Chetham’s School of Music, whom the Daily Mail (News, 25 November) discovered had been defrocked for two instances of sexual misconduct, has never been a member of the House of Lords. Considering that he also notched up three wives, I doubt he could have found the time.