My nation is in fact officially Christian (at least a form of it in any case) but I know most nations out there have no state recognised religion like Anglicanism. This means that whenever anything remotely connected with religion occurs here, men like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens pop up to suggest that we ought to have no state religion.
These atheists that so readily can be identified as either the enemy themselves or a kind of useful idiot. It is certainly the case that they can easily be mimicked by irreligious and poorly educated people who enjoy the pseudo-intellectual air it grants them.
“Why should the country have an official religion when most of us don’t believe in it?” they say. They ignore the fact that their country was built on that religion, of course, because their own degenerate pop culture and social mores cannot be traced back to Christianity.
The more intellectual of the atheists smile placidly and reassure us that under secularism, everyone would be free to believe in whatever “sky fairies” (and it is always sky fairies) they wished to. Naturally, though, secular humanism, and all that goes with it, would be the default. And given that most people will lazily accept whatever is given to them that requires the least work, most will accept this label, especially if it confers extra intellectual credit.
This suggestion probably sounds reasonable to most irreligious people, and given how the question is usually phrased (always in terms of religious freedom, never atheist control) most well meaning Christians would go along with it.
It does of course aid the Muslims and Hindus as well, for removing establishment Christianity represents an increase in their power, and as the courts can always be counted on to interpret hate crime legislation as favourably as possible, it actually puts their religion on a higher pedestal than Christianity.
Naturally, the atheists will note, the removal of Christianity from the establishment means dismantling the social traditions that have sprung up around it. It would not be acceptable to hold prayers in Parliament, or observe any sort of public display of Christianity, lest it offend a Muslim and demonstrate favouritism.
No Christian would ever be able to defend his actions by reason of his beliefs, either. If one refused to cooperate with or employ degenerates or unbelievers in your business, one would be ordered to comply with the hate legislation, and be told that we can believe whatever we want, but we must act tolerantly towards others, lest we damage their freedom to believe what they want.
This does not take into account the basis of religion. We do not merely believe, but allow our actions to be governed by those beliefs. If we do not have the freedom to act according to our beliefs, we do not have freedom of religion, something which the Human Rights Act purports to offer us.
And so we see that any belief that does not fit within the boundaries of multicultural secular humanism will not in fact be tolerated. Far from allowing everybody greater freedom, secularism merely restricts religious practices to those deemed to be of trifling threat to the secular establishment.
In the long run, the presumption in favour of atheism will mean that religious belief will gradually tail off, as there is no benefit in believing but quite a few disbenefits in following an unfashionable creed. Eventually it would disappear completely, as parents fail to pass their beliefs on to their children.
This was actually attempted in the Soviet Union, where religious activity was prohibited before the age of majority, at which point they were unlikely to break the habit of a lifetime. These things would be advocated by atheists as soon as they gained total secularism, on the grounds that religion was fomenting bad feeling. It could just as easily be considered that atheism was fomenting bad feeling amongst Christians.
Hence secularism and religious freedom are merely the freedom of unbelievers to restrict the practices of believers. Any nation that was officially secular, therefore, could never be a nation ruled by true Christians. For us, democracy ought merely to be a mechanism by which we would hope to achieve theocratic rule, rather than a force for good in and of itself.
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