I'm fed up with the prejudice I encounter every day. The snide asides, the jokes, the condescension. I am the victim of the one kind of bigotry that our society sanctions - bias against Christians.

If I were a Muslim, the threat of the fatwa would check any disrespect; if a Jew, accusations of anti-Semitism would shut people up. But as a Christian I must bear the burden of our secular society's contempt for all faiths. We are the ones who get lumped with Cliff Richard and Bible belt homophobes, the ones caricatured as vacant-eyed zombies or zealots who doorstep Marie Stopes clinics, waving placards with dead foetuses. Oh, and if, like me, you're a Catholic, you are supposed to have ten children and are suspected of worshipping the threadbare remnants of some medieval martyr's tunic.

Tony Blair was wrong. The 20th century didn't belong to the forces of conservatism, it belonged to the forces of secularism. Liberals on the left and libertarians on the right created a world inimical to any kind of censorship - especially self-censorship. "Anything goes" was the motto of this cross-party group - and anything did, from the unfettered greed of the City fat cats to the purchase of a catwalk model's eggs on the Internet.

Religion, which aims to impose a code of conduct on us, offends this moral deregulation. And it is guilty of a more serious taboo: in an era that places me, myself and I squarely at the centre of the universe, the believer thinks of mankind as a humble satellite to God's sun, and teaches that our neighbours are as important as ourselves.

Religion is truly "alternative". Today, nothing upsets conventions more than men and women who operate within a moral framework and who try to live by ideals. As for the rest of the believer's marching orders - self-sacrifice, vision, charity - they, too, would trigger universal fear and loathing, had they not grown banal as the lyrics to new Labour's mood music, words on the spin-doctor's checklist for his master's speeches.

Despite our self-proclaimed Christian Prime Minister, the chattering classes' favourite sport continues to be the baiting of Christians (I suppose feeding us to the lions might worry the RSPCA). I'm fed up of turning the other cheek as non-believers take pot-shots at my faith. They call us ignorant - yet I defy you to find a chardonnay-sipping Islington dweller who can name the ten commandments or has read more than one verse of the Koran. They call us superstitious - yet crystals, palmistry and card readings are a booming business in this new age. They say that some of the worst atrocities of our millennium have been committed in the name of religion - yet to hold the faithful responsible for the Inquisition or the Crusades is akin to blaming today's German youth for the Holocaust or today's American teenagers for Hiroshima or Vietnam.

More important, non-believers claim that to revive religion is to check progress. Yet you don't need to be a follower of the Ayatollah Khomeini to be suspicious of some of our scientific breakthroughs, such as GM food and a la carte humanity; and as for globalisation, so long mooted as a key consequence of so-called progress, I don't remember that all the demonstrators in Seattle belonged to the Knights of Malta. Our society may be wealthier than ever - that's some kind of progress - but increasingly atheists, like believers, resent their identity being linked to their material worth and their potential in generating wealth.

Andrew Marr, in his NS essay for this issue (see page 45), trembles at the thought of "a revival of religions". He should stop being so conventional and hail such a renaissance, not fear it. Religion will question some of the nostrums of the 20th century, and those who spoon-fed us these myths. This may make for an unsettling time, but it will be a more honest one. And honesty, in that narrow-minded religious world of mine, is a virtue.

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