am a rampant atheist, and there is a war going on, provoked by fanatical Muslims. I believe that sectarian schools in Northern Ireland have helped to perpetuate violence. I fear increasing racial segregation here if we allow more religious schools. I agree with the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee that the more irreligious a country, the greater its happiness and contentment. I am offended by the new category of “faith schools”. I see no reason why my taxes should support the indoctrination of children in beliefs that to my mind are little more than superstition.

Yet I hesitate before I denounce these schools and the Government’s plans to increase their number. This does not mean that I am impressed by the argument advanced by Canon John Hall of the Church of England Board of Education in the Church Times: that, unless Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists get their own schools, they will not feel fully part of British society. If this is the problem, why do ministers invite the CofE to set up more schools? If Canon Hall is so concerned about what he calls “moderation and harmony”, why does his church not relinquish control of the schools that it runs?

What interests me is do church schools really get better results than other state schools and, if so, why?

New research by Dr John Marks, for the Institute of Civil Society, a right-wing think-tank, shows what we all know: that, on average, church schools get better results. But it also shows that the gap between the best-performing and the worst-performing church schools is just as great as that among council schools.

To me this confirms that the magic ingredient is the tendency of church schools to recruit pupils from more affluent, bookish and motivated homes.

But do church schools add something? Church schools may have more mixed intakes than council schools. We know that the middle classes are more adept at getting their children into church schools and more willing to undergo the midnight conversions. But the working class has many genuinely committed church-goers, particularly among the Afro-Caribbean population. If church schools are more successful than council schools, the explanation may be that they are more comprehensive.

The churches, uniquely in the modern world, may embody values that are compatible with true education. They, almost alone, have held at bay the depredations of commercial sponsorship. Walk round our cities and where else, except in the cathedrals, can you get away from advertising and branding? The churches have become more egalitarian as political parties have become less so. Even Europe’s social democratic parties now take, at best, a meritocratic view: that the virtuous are those who get to the top and make lots of money, provided they didn’t get a leg-up from inherited wealth. Only the churches still have an inherently egalitarian ideology, a belief that, whatever their talents, all human beings are the children of God.

So as an atheist, I remain clear that church schools should be abolished.

But as a socialist, I want ideological allies wherever I can find them, and I think that we on the left may underestimate the potential value of modern Christianity (and of other religions).

Do I contradict myself? Very well, as Walt Whitman said, I contradict myself. When people are hijacking planes, dropping bombs and launching missiles with an absolute certainty of their rightness, I prefer a few moments of hesitation and a bit of honest doubt.

Peter Wilby is editor of the New Statesman