A Christian MP has slammed a report on the declining influence of Christianity as "insidious" and "conformist".
Sir Edward Leigh, president of the Catholic Union of Great Britain, lambasted last month's "Living with Difference" in an article for House Magazine. The MP for Gainsborough said the report was nothing but a "clever attempt to denude the public square... while promoting religious indifferentism".
"Great Britain is tolerant precisely because it is a Christian country," he wrote. "If we banish religion from public life I fear we will become increasingly victim to a creeping conformist totalitarianism dressed in a therapeutic guise."
In addition to rubbishing the report's findings, he also suggested it made unsubstantiated accusations against Catholics who will view it as a "specific attack."
"The report," wrote Leigh, "in a mealy mouthed way accused Catholic schools of fostering sectarianism without giving any supporting evidence."
"How insidious and ingenious to employ the victims of sectarianism as an argument in favour of destroying those victims' schools, culture, and right to live out the fullness of their faith in modern Britain."
The Conservative MP, who this week led a debate against the Government's plans to allow Ofsted to inspect church groups and sunday schools, also attacked the sort of society the report called for as "dull, dreary, conformist and obsequiously inoffensive."
"We would certainly be even more subject to the tyranny of naked materialism and self-centredness."
The staunch article called for the report to be ignored. It was one of a number of responses published in the magazine from parliamentarians of all faiths.
Other contributors included David Urquhart, the Bishop of Birmingham and Convenor of the Lords Spiritual, Baroness Massey, a Labour peer and secretary of the All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group and Baroness Neuberger, a crossbench peer and Senior Rabbi at the West London Synagogue.
