THE secretary of a local branch of the Christian Union seems to have gone off his rocker. Simon Carpenter makes the front page of this week's Church Times with his suggestion that offices and factories should receive the laying on of hands.

Now, blessing the workers is something I can understand, but laying hands on photocopiers and modems causes me more than a little difficulty. Mr Carpenter says: "Laying hands on the building may sound weird, but it can show you mean business." What sort of business? Funny business, if you ask me - like talking to the trees and remembering not to step on a join in the flagstones. He goes on: "We can impart a blessing to our workplace by touching the building and quietly claim it for God as we enter it each morning. He says we should keep "praying over every entrance, keeping the enemy out."

It's this sort of mild lunacy that gives religion a bad name. I've come across it before. When I was a country parson in Yorkshire, a neighbour gave me a lift into York one day, and, as she approached the city walls, she began to pray aloud. You'll never guess what she was praying for - a parking space. I asked whether she had considered the blatant immorality of this prayer. Given there is a limited amount of parking space, if God were to reserve a space for her then that space would be denied to someone else: perhaps someone whose need was greater. This reduces the Maker of heaven and earth to the status of a glorified traffic warden.

This is the religion of "me-ism" and it isn't religion at all, only selfishness dressed up as piety. GK Chesterton said: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything." That has certainly come true in our time. You can't open a colour supplement or turn to the health page of a newspaper without coming across the whole fantasy world of runes and crystals and fads and diets. One of the latest consumer-new-age fads is called feng shui. There was a piece about it in The Times recently: "While fewer than five per cent of house buyers bother to invest in a structural survey, a growing number are spending hundreds of pounds checking the flow of chi". People, we were told, "avoid house numbers with a four in them because, in Chinese, the word four means death". The writer urged us "not to buy a house at the head of a T-junction, because all the positive energy will run away".

But clever people don't bother with this muck, do they? Keith Barclay, a Leeds Further Education College lecturer, was quoted in the same article: "We knew there were things wrong with the house in feng shui terms, but we thought we could do small things like put in a three-legged toad - the god of wealth - placing the toad looking out towards the front door."

People reject traditional Christianity as outmoded, as if it had been discredited by a few speculations by Charles Darwin, but at the same time they turn to their "stars" every morning. I read one horoscope that told me to take care and stay in, while another said it was time to be expansive and make that journey I had been putting off.

The world has gone crazy. How else to explain how people can reject the traditional faith that occupied the minds of such as St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, only to turn to three-legged toads and the avoiding of T-junctions? This early summer is the season of the great Christian festivals of Ascension, Whitsunday and Trinity; and these festivals mark teachings which have been meditated upon by the finest minds of our civilisation. And what are we recommended instead? To pray for parking spaces and bless photocopiers.

Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange

Published: Tuesday, May 29, 2001