Her Majesty the Queen declared in her Christmas speech that we need religious faith to sustain and guide us at time of crisis and tragedy (The Argus, December 26).

This ignores the large proportion of the population who are indifferent to claims made by the Christian Church and other religious institutions.

Rather than uniting, religion is a divisive force in society.

Perhaps the Queen did not see reports of Roman Catholic schoolchildren in Belfast running a gauntlet of Protestant hatred.

-W J McIlroy, Somerhill Road, Hove