In his landmark 1963 book, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think?, Harry Blamires wrote,
The standardizing influence of the Ministry of Education has weighed heavily on these [Church] colleges [in England], and their development illustrates what it means to secularize a community, not by officially denying its religion, but by so departmentalizing it that it is deprived of any overt influence upon the community’s conscious purpose and activities. Christianity is emasculated of its intellectual relevance. It remains a vehicle of spiritual and moral guidance at the individual level perhaps; at the communal level it is little more than an expression of sentimentalized togetherness.
The mental secularization of Christians means that nowadays we meet only as worshiping beings and as moral beings, but not as thinking beings…. This is not because there are no propositions on which we can agree with fellow-Christians, but because there is no common field of discourse in which we can dispute either harmoniously or inharmoniously, unless we first step out of our theological skins.
(From page 16 in the 1978 Servant Books edition)
Forty-six years later, is this still true? Could this have been an incipient statement of what we now call the fact-value dichotomy? Has it gotten better or worse since then? What do you think?