Thank you, Peter! An issue I didn't deal with in this is that--apart from any losses to readers--authors can suffer collateral damage if they incorporate religious themes or motifs into their work and critics don't "get" what they've done.

Emma Donoghue couldn't have spelled out more clearly (in the Economist) what she was doing, but critics still ignored it. I suspect some authors simply have given up on writing about religious themes, believing that critics or others will only ignore or misunderstand them. It's a loss for all of us.