In her article about ‘Christian persecution’, Andrea Minichiello Williams writes that, for hundreds of years, ‘most of the great advances in public life, in health care, education and social provision, came as a result of Christian conviction that cares for the good of all’.

If religion really does have such an important role to play in the moral guidance of public life, how is it that areas such as animal welfare, race relations, care for the disabled and the outlawing of sexual discrimination, have massively improved at a time of unprecedented growth in secularism?

Alun Powell, Parkend, Gloucestershire