The public figures who last month criticised David Cameron for describing Britain as a Christian country were the inheritors of a long tradition of rejection of faith. Here, the author of a new book on non-believers sifts the secularists from the humanists, and the atheists from the anti-theists “I have just read your little pamphlet on Christianity”, T.S. Eliot told Bertrand Russell in June 1927, “with some sadness. All the reasons you advance were familiar to me, I think, at the age of six or eight; and I confess that your pamphlet seems to me a piece of childish folly.” The object of Eliot’s disappointment was Russell’s recently published lecture to the National Secular Society, Why I am not a Christian. The great logician was explaining why belief i