Stuart Jeffries piece on faith and unbelief is an example of a certain kind of liberal intellectual position which seeks to stand above the current debates about the place of religion in contemporary society, to (using the term Jeffries is so fond of) wryly adjudicate from the sidelines. His claim is that there is a vicious and uncompromising battle going on between two equally intolerant clans - "shrill camps shouting unedifyingly at each other" - the believers and the faithless. The core thesis is that rather than accepting the beliefs of others, secularists have become hysterical in their quest to "airbrush" religion from public debate, to create a soulless, value free public sphere.

The evidence for this claim is depressingly shopworn. He quotes without challenge the preposterous assertion from Colin Slee, Dean of Southwark, that "atheists like Richard Dawkins are just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs on the tube" (since when is writing books and making arguments comparable to mass murder?). He also criticises both Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens for their "aggressive" attitude to believers without addressing the substance of their many and complex arguments. He concludes with an endorsement of the much-touted idea of a public sphere composed of groups "respectful of each other's most cherished beliefs." (Or none, though this tends to be hastily added as an after-thought).

Throughout, atheists and secularist are characterised as "dogmatic", "evangelical", "fundamentalist", and as obsessed by God and the idea of belief, as Billy Graham. Jeffries is quite right to point out that these days secularists seem exasperated. But who can blame us when the case against unaccountable and undemocratic religious privilege is so misrepresented by articles like his?

Nowhere, for example, does he make the point made that while both Dawkins and Hitchens are polemicists whose aim is to challenge, stimulate and infuriate they do also make strong and serious arguments which should be engaged at the level of logic and reason. Are they wrong? If they are, where are the counter-arguments beyond calling them names, or equating them with book burners and murderers?

He gives no sense that what these two prominent controversialists say is critically examined and debated vigorously by other secularists and atheists. The January issue of New Humanist - the magazine that I edit - featured a forthright and at times highly critical interview with Dawkins by Laurie Taylor - who is every inch a secularist and an atheist but takes a different view on notions such as the inevitability of progress, or the sociological functioning of faith.

And other examples this month give the lie to the idea that secularists are only concerned with the lack of evidence for God. Francis Beckett details the city academy scandal where new schools have been handed over to religious - even creationist - groups on the cheap; Chris Hedges analyses the growing political ambitions of the evangelical right in the US, and other articles look at the potential for a human-centred pornography, question whether string theory might be a new kind of metaphysics and looks at the question of how those of us who place a high value on reason might accommodate or understand the irrational - rituals like circumcision or the reality slips, the rents in the fabric of the ordered predictable life, so beloved of the surrealists.

There is a lively and sophisticated world of non-belief out there which Jeffries utterly ignores in the service of his they're-all-as-bad-as-each-other dismissal. Why can't we all be more like HL Mencken, is his plea - he means wry and accepting of other views. Was this the same Mencken who wrote: "The evangelical churches are rapidly becoming public nuisances. Neglecting almost altogether their old concern about individual salvation, they have converted themselves into vast engines for harassing and oppressing persons who dissent from their naïve and often preposterous theology." Hardly "respectful of others cherished beliefs", was he? The one thing I can agree with Jeffries on is the importance of Mencken, though I suspect that if he were around now his arguments would be far closer to those of Christopher Hitchens than Stuart Jeffries would like to imagine.