It emerges, too, that Canberrans are almost the most "godless" of Australians. A Canberra Times saga of a few days ago, Census 2016: ABS reveals Canberra's most religious and most godless suburbs, reported dwindling church attendances. The story was illustrated with a photograph of an Ainslie clergyman standing forlornly among church pews now seldom graced with believers' bottoms. The 2016 Census recorded 36.2 per cent of Canberrans reporting "no religion" This is a rise of 13 per cent in the past decade.

"Calooh! Callay!" atheists may bubble, imagining that this all points to the coming of the frabjous day when we will put all that religious nonsense behind us and when a new day of reason will dawn.

But wait, fellow atheists. Is what the Census tells us necessarily good news? When the mind is unshackled from irrational old-fashioned religious beliefs, freed from the mumbo-jumbo dungeons of Anglicanism and Catholicism, does it, the mind, necessarily gambol free? What if, instead, it goes in search of other mumbo jumbos? In what New Age directions may Canberra's 36.2 per cent have gone?

I ask this because the decline in traditional religious observance has coincided with a boom in those of us who say we are now SBNRs (that we are Spiritual But Not Religious).

The newsworthiness of the Census 2016 finding gives a special readability to two mind-tickling US pieces published online this week. They are psychology professor Clay Routledge's Don't Believe In God? Maybe You'll Try U.F.O.s (from the New York Times) and David French's Post-Christian America. Gullible, Intolerant and Superstitious (from the National Review). Both pieces quote research into the SBNRish directions post-Christian US minds are going. Both authors are appalled.

"Evidence suggests," Routledge says, "that the religious mind persists even when we lose faith in traditional religious beliefs and institutions …"

The professor and colleagues have done studies that show, the professor says, "those who do not frequently attend church are twice as likely [as frequent churchgoers] to believe in ghosts and to hold empirically unsupported views about UFOs, about intelligent aliens monitoring the lives of humans".

It's all to do, the professor divines, with "the pursuit of meaning".

"The less religious the participants [in the studies] the less they perceived their lives as meaningful … this lack of meaning is associated with a desire to find meaning, which in turn was associated with belief in UFOs and alien visitors."

This columnist, though an atheist, has never enjoyed the company of other atheists. In my experience atheists' veneers of reason are very thin. One is not far into conversation with an atheist before he asks what your star sign is or before she swears she is a reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte.

The aforementioned David French has had similar experiences.

"I remember an elite-educated secular friend who scoffed at my wife's Christian faith; this friend was also convinced that her child had an 'indigo aura' that imbued him with special gifts. And how can I forget the strange sight of Harvard students walking in and out of the neighbourhood witchcraft store? Just today, I saw the news that much-beloved singer Lana Del Rey is asking her fans to join a 'mass occult ritual against President Donald Trump'."

Ex-Christian, SBNRish readers, what sorts of spiritual substitutes have you turned to?

On Tuesday, looking for somewhere quiet to go and sit and think about these important things I went to wonderful, elegant All Saints Anglican church in Ainslie. Needless to say (for as the aforementioned Canberra Times piece reported Canberra's inner-north is the most godless part of our increasingly godless city) I had the dear building to myself.

After praying to God (just in case He does exist) for the early impeachment of the satanic Trump, I fell to wondering where my former devotion to Anglicanism may have gone. Where now do I find meaning? UFOs and the occult have little appeal for me but I do identify with those millions who invest a very religious-seeming zeal in their sporting fandom. My enthusiasm for Tuggeranong FC (Premier League soccer), for the CBR Brave ice hockey warriors and especially for the UK's Norwich City FC the mighty Canaries has a satisfying irrationality about it that reminds me a lot of religious belief.

My wife has just bought me, as a wedding anniversary gift, an Official Merchandise Norwich City FC Garden Gnome painted a glowing canary yellow and canary green.

Yes, in one sense (looked at with cold, dispassionate atheism) it is a frivolous thing. And yet for me in my deep, spiritual fandom it is somehow something more.

The next time I am about to scoff at Christians for venerating religious artefacts (perhaps that famous forgery the Shroud of Turin or one of the several dozen displayed skulls of John the Baptist that naïve pilgrims flock to ogle) I will remind myself that I too have a sacred artefact. It is a garden gnome so precious to me that I'm not game to put out in the garden where the sacrilegious ravens may deface it with their guano and chip its paint with their blasphemous beaks.