Left-wing Christianity is hopeless against the new atheists says Damian Thompson

Damian Thompson's blog was silent for several days but now he's baaaaack with a delightfully scathing post about Occupy protesters and hopes some Left-wing Christians have that they will revive Christianity.  Here's an excerpt but please go on over and read the whole thing:

Of all the delusions nurtured by Left-wing Christians, perhaps the loopiest is that anyone under the age of 40 gives a monkey’s about their opinions. -snip-
The average bright 25-year-old Briton isn’t looking for supernatural solutions to existential problems. Senior churchmen speak of the “spiritual hunger” of the young. That’s wishful thinking. The next generation don’t believe in God. Few of them frame their arguments as rabidly as Richard Dawkins; they don’t all use the word “atheist” – “humanist” is cooler – but that’s what they are. If they worship anything, it’s “human rights” or, in the case of Johann Hari, Laurie Penny and Owen Jones, themselves.

Their attitude towards Christians ranges from indifference to hatred. This is partly thanks to the paedophile scandal in the Catholic Church. We can argue about the extent to which this has been misreported, but not about the fact that crimes against children were covered up by bishops (and not just conservative ones, either). These crimes were seized upon by academics, writers and opportunistic publishers to create an indestructible caricature of institutional Christianity.

One reason that caricature isn’t challenged is that this is the first generation of young people whose parents didn’t go to church themselves. Their religious education consists of nativity plays, visits to Sikh temples and lectures about energy-saving light bulbs.
But that doesn’t make the new atheists stupid, despite their intergalactic levels of conceit. The brightest of them are far, far cleverer than the bishops, who (if you ignore the puzzling anomaly of Rowan Williams) are men of middling intellect – and that’s being polite, in the case of the Catholic hierarchy. All that drivel about “religion in the public square” makes me want to convert to a more rigorous creed, such as a Prince Philip-worshipping cargo cult.