Can Political Theology Save Secularism?

David Sessions thinks secularism in the US is in a deficit crisis of personal meaning. He says books like Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists are emblematic of the current secularist ideology:

What is dismaying about Religion for Atheists is how deeply it embodies the ideology of the present—how it can describe so well the anxiety, isolation, and disappointment of secular life and yet still fail to identify their source. Botton’s central obsession is the insane ways bourgeois postmoderns try to live, namely in a perpetual upward swing of ambition and achievement, where failure indicates character deficiency despite an almost total lack of social infrastructure to help us navigate careers, relationships, parenting, and death. But he seems uninterested in how those structures were destroyed or what it might take to rebuild them, other than a few novelties like a restaurant where patrons are guided into intimate confessions with strangers, or temples without gods. Botton wants to keep bourgeois secularism and add a few new quasi-religious social routines. Quasi-religious social routines may indeed be a part of the solution, as we shall see, but they cannot be simply flung atop a regime as indifferent to human values as liberal capitalism.

I've been dismissive of de Botton's thinking on religion because, much like the title of his book on philosophy, subtitled as a "Guide to Happiness," it is based on a false premise. More here.