Alain de Botton is having a bit of a moment. His latest book, Religion for Atheists has set many tongues wagging, and his accompanying ‘secular-temples’ proposal has proven even more incendiary. So committed is de Botton to this latest initiative, that he even wrote an article about the secular ‘uses’ of the ‘trivial ritual’ of Christmas: “O come all ye faithless”. They say that all publicity is good publicity; if so, de Botton is doing very well indeed.

Despite his formidable intellect and obvious talents as a writer, however, I am unconvinced by the hype. In fact, I believe that this time de Botton has become obsessed with a project that is misguided, offensive and strikingly unoriginal. “I was brought up”, he writes, “in a devoutly atheistic household by a father who made Richard Dawkins look open-minded on the matter of there perhaps being a supreme being”. De Botton presents himself, in contrast, as an "enlightened atheist", who after a "crisis of faithlessness" in his twenties became liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without subscribing to its supernatural content.

One of the supposed merits of Religion for Atheists is that, as such a liberal-minded atheist, de Botton manages to blend “deep respect with total impiety”. I struggled to find the respect. While clearly taking great pains to avoid being overtly offensive to religious belief, the strain of doing so shows in de Botton’s otherwise elegant prose. He constantly sounds patronizing and more than once lets his contempt slip through the net: he compares the Catholic Church to McDonalds, a ritual pilgrimage to the Shrine of St. Anthony to a trip round the M25. An interesting conception of “deep respect” – although he has the “total impiety” spot on.

Fundamentally, though, it is not de Botton’s hypocritical disrespect, his condescension or even his frequently-bemoaned popularizing (the dreaded ‘dumbing down’) that gets under my skin. Rather, it is his assumption – indeed his claim – that by applying religious concepts to modern secular life he is doing something breathtakingly original. Religion for Atheists is plugged as a “truly helpful alternative” to the “boring and unproductive” religious debate; I fail, however, to see what is quite so ‘alternative’ about it.

The idea that there are aspects of religious life that can be transferred into secular contexts is self-evident: one needs only to walk into a carol concert in King's College Chapel, or an art exhibition showcasing religious paintings, or into a non-religious Christmas Day celebration to see that. As Terry Eagleton pointed out in his review of the book, liberal-capitalist societies have often offered ‘secular religion’ as a way of promoting cohesive communitarianism, and even most believers adopt an ‘a la carte’ approach to the doctrines of their faith, to one extent or another. Religion for Atheists is stating the absolutely obvious and presenting it as innovative sensationalism.

That de Botton’s view of theology is frighteningly old-fashioned, and his concept of atheism self-centred and narrow is demonstrated by the fact that no one seems to want his secular temples. Even Richard Dawkins himself has said that they would be a waste of money. Not only has de Botton failed to add anything new to the “boring and unproductive debate”, but he has restructured the nature of the debate itself, making it far more selfish and belligerent, and forcing it to conform to his own reductive ideas. The Religion for Atheists project would work if we lived in a world where you were either a religious zealot or an atheist replica of de Botton’s dad. Thankfully, things are far more complicated than that.