Nicky Morgan believes that children should be taught that the UK is ‘in the main’ a Christian country. Photograph: John Stillwell/PA

On 28 December I performed my annual progress around a Midlands motorway triangle, through sluggish bank holiday traffic, to venerate relatives’ graves. My eight-year-old daughter accompanied me, leavening my loneliness, and I made the dutiful day delightful by insisting we listen to Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds in its entirety. Don’t you wish I was your dad?

We enjoyed impersonating the portentous tones of Richard Burton at appropriately banal points in our pilgrimage; “No one would have believed, in the last days of Christmas 2015, the length of toilet queues at Strensham services. And yet, slowly and surely, the desperate motorists drew towards the lavatories.” The day was like an episode of The Trip, but with two Rob Brydons, both of whom could only do Richard Burton.

Between you and me, I have struggled with what Christmas means this year. I dip into the Christian tradition that is my cultural heritage with a yearly mass. And I enjoy Yule ritual that predates the belief system dominant in these islands this last millennium, recently replaced by television, political correctness gone mad, rampant consumerism, and gays.

But inappropriate weather skews the season. Things should bloom in spring. That’s why the church dumped the resurrection on to the festival of the fertility goddess Ostara, giving converts some rebirth-themed continuity.

Where the Easter Bunny fits remains mysterious, though rabbits’ reproductive capacity makes them, like Olive and George Osmond, folkloric symbols of fecundity. Indeed, in Utah, the Easter Osmond, clad in flares and enormous teeth, flings a boiled egg, smeared with semen, at childless Mormons.

The festival is in flux. Are the obsolete snowflake decorations of today’s un-wintery, wet, warm Christmas now merely a race memory of the days when we had definable seasons, rather than just climatic blandness interrupted by catastrophes?

Approaching the cemetery, I said to my daughter, “I do not believe in an afterlife, so why am I putting flowers on graves?” “It makes you feel nice,” she said, “and it is nice to remember people.” She was right, and rational, but, crucially, she was also humane and sensitive. I tidied up the headstones and placed pot plants. “My life will be forever autumn, now you’re not here,” I sang, an atheist at Christmas, enacting ancestor worship, in lieu of a lamb to love.

My children’s mother is Catholic. We tolerate each other’s views with diligent determination, bending magnanimously in the face of educational or cultural obstacles. The children have friends of all faiths and none. I hope they will learn about religions, and non-religious beliefs, in enough detail to allow us all to reference them confidently. And I’d like standup comedy audiences of young people to be well versed enough to appreciate my clever jokes about consubstantiation and Islamic taboos, instead of just staring in fear.

The Christmas assemblies I attended this year were, given that the children of parents professing Christian beliefs were a minority, understandable compromises of utilitarian poesy, recalling the Wookiees’ Life Day celebrations, in the suppressed 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special. (This remains the most thematically coherent of the original’s seven sequels, The Force Awakens lacking both Bea Arthur doing a recipe, and a miniaturised Jefferson Starship.)

I want my kids to appreciate the stories informing Milton and Blake, and The Life of Brian and Lenny Bruce, without being told they must believe them. And I think that a diverse religious education could dilute extremism. A child sees that a multiplicity of faiths must mean none can be absolutely true and that, irrespective of whether a God exists, these supposedly revealed truths, in all their manifestations, evidence our desire to dramatise experience.

And so I welcomed the November high court judgment, by Mr Justice Warby, that the religious studies GCSE should reflect multiple beliefs and non-beliefs. And, despite being a card-carrying secularist, I have been diligently reading the children The Pop-up Book of the Nativity every night over Christmas as part of their liberal education, to the particular irritation of my 28-year-old son.

War of the Worlds finished (“Can anybody hear me? Come in. Come in.”). Radio 4’s Beyond Belief began. It was. The panellists discussed the afterlife. Shaunaka Rishi Das, a Hindu, believed, like George Lucas and the Jedi Knights, that the spirit continues to live on as energy after the body has died.

Dr Shuruq Naguib, Lancaster University Islamic studies lecturer, accepted an afterlife because doing so is one of the pillars of Islam and she is a Muslim and so therefore she believed in it, a circuitous position I imagined unlikely to make for enlightening listening.

And the writer and broadcaster Peter Stanford, the thinking person’s Catholic content provider, said he embraced the afterlife, but with the considered professional caution that plays well with the target demographic.

All believed in life after death. And so, for a moment, did I, as listening to this show in a traffic jam on the M40 was my idea of hell. “There should be a scientist there,” said my eight-year-old, with the wisdom of a child, “to spoil everyone’s fun.”

I thought, “I am going to front a radio discussion on whether the Loch Ness monster is a dinosaur, an alien, or a ghost, without anyone to suggest it probably isn’t anything at all,” but then at the 15-minute mark a doctor was interviewed to provide balance and my prejudice was pricked.

Then the news came on. A small story, secreted suspiciously in the builder’s cleft between Christmas and new year, revealed that education secretary Nicky Morgan had announced the high court findings need have “no impact” on schools’ religious teachings. There was no obligation on schools to cover non-religious views, and students should be told Britain is “in the main Christian”, even though it demonstrably isn’t, and we obviously need to work out what cultural cohesion can replace the binding agent of faith.

A spokesperson, who may have been glossing off-piste, said the minister sought to prevent a “creeping ratchet effect” of humanist attempts to make the curriculum fairer. Always use the word “creeping” if you want to imply evil. You could put the word “creeping” in front of the words “Dame Vera Lynn” and see her become a pariah overnight.

I thought about Nicky Morgan, and I was overcome with a feeling of profound despair that made a dark day darker, as a generation’s chances faded. And I wondered how something so obvious to children could be hidden from the person responsible for their education. “Can anybody hear me? Come in. Come in.”