An interesting interview with the ever-thoughtful Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams:

Can we make sense of morality without a religious notion of a transcendent or supernatural being?
I think that, to make sense of unconditional rights or claims, we need to be clear that there is such a thing as universal human nature and that it has some intrinsic dignity or worth. To try and ground this independently of the idea of a transcendent source of value seems to me not finally feasible. People do, of course, make such claims, and do so in good faith, but I don't see how you can define a universally shared, equal, independent-of-local-culture-and-habit conception of human flourishing without something more than a pragmatic or immanent basis.

In other words, I think morality ultimately needs a notion of the sacred - and for the Christian that means understanding all human beings without exception as the objects of an equal, unswerving, unconditional love.

What are the consequences of pushing religion to the margins of the public sphere?
If religion is pushed into private spaces, as increasingly it tends to be by our public discourse, we lose one of the most emotionally and imaginatively resourceful ways of seeing human behaviour; we lose something of the sense that certain acts may be good independently of whether they are sensible or successful in the world's terms. I suppose you could say that we lose the "contemplative" dimension to ethics, the belief that some things are worth ­admiring in themselves.

Are there forms of secularism that religious believers can accept?
Certainly a religious believer can be firm in their faith without assuming that their point of view should be privileged in public discussion or has any absolute right to be followed. Elsewhere I have distinguished between a "procedural" and a "programmatic" secularism. The first recognises that public discussion must make room for explicit reference to the roots of moral judgements, including their roots in religious belief. It makes for a fuller and more lively argument in society, and it avoids the creeping assumption that all reasonable people think in exactly the same way, for the same reasons...

Here's the whole thing.