In dozens of countries, disputes that we may think of as ethnic, political or economic are now unmistakably religious in character: everything from squabbles over school textbooks in New Delhi to throat-slitting in Syria. We see this most clearly in the Middle East, where national boundaries are dissolving and reforming along religious lines. Our inability to recognise religion means, for example, that we plotted an invasion of Iraq in 2003 without realising that we’d be blowing the lid off a Sunni vs Shia civil war.

Even in Britain, our politicians keep being surprised when religion bursts back into the public debate. We now know that state schools — secular ones, not faith schools — in Birmingham were infiltrated by radical Muslims to the point where they were turning into madrasas. This was made possible by the gullibility of politicians and civil servants with regard to Islam — in particular, their belief that ‘moderate Muslims’ can easily be distinguished from Islamists. But it also reflects our ignorance of faith in general: the school inspectors, blind to religion, didn’t know what to look for in Birmingham…

Fanatics are only part of the story, however. To understand why religion is becoming the new politics, we need to connect an extra set of dots: between extremists, their wealthy supporters, politicians, bureaucrats — and ordinary believers who tell pollsters they ‘reject violence’ but keep quiet when it’s perpetrated.