Public policy in a democracy rests upon public opinion, which in turn rests on public feeling. The feelings people have towards remote and abstract objects such as states and categories are normally pretty stable, but when they do change, they resemble earthquakes in the political world. Shelby Steele has recently been writing of the revolution in public feeling that took place in America in the 1960s, when white racism was replaced by white guilt. Whole new social and moral structures have been thrown up. The appearance of anti-Americanism in Europe in the wake of 9/11 is less fundamental, but is also in many respects a revolution of feeling. Israel has found itself buffeted by this change. My concern is with another shift in recent sentiment, less dramatic but in my view no less significant. It is the rising hatred of Christianity among Western peoples, which I shall call “Christophobia.”

I am not, of course, talking of secularism. Scepticism about Christianity largely began in the eighteenth century and increased steadily throughout the twentieth. It is hardly surprising that a revelation couched in the idiom of a remote past and purporting to reveal the transcendental aspects of the human condition could not survive the coming of what we may call “the scientific world view,” in which truth is tested by empirical confirmation. Much of Christianity has responded to this development by retreating into a modernist accommodation with what it takes to be science. It has generated the ecumenical movement, a