The German supermarket chain Lidl has been caught removing the crosses from a picture of a Greek island used to sell cheese. The packaging on its “Greek” range of foods shows the gorgeous blue-domed churches of the island of Santorini – but only their domes. The crosses that in real life surmount them have been digitally excised.

The company claims this is part of a deliberate policy to remove all religious symbols from their packaging, in case it’s divisive. The usual suspects are insinuating that Muslim symbols would be treated differently, though there’s no evidence that this is actually the case.

Much more likely is that this is simply an act of bureaucratic incompetence and lack of cultural sensitivity, but in this case the culture to which Lidl is being insensitive is actually their own. Christianity is one of the central elements of European culture, even today. European-style secularism has a wholly symbiotic relationship with it – one explanation for why it has failed almost everywhere else in the world. But Christianity, in this sense, is not a label. It is not even a set of beliefs to which people may assent or not. It is much more like a very long marriage – 2,000 years of braided arguments: a shared world to disagree about together. You can’t just amputate all that.

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The ideal of a Europe in which people no longer have religious disagreements is understandable, but I think that it is unattainable so long as there are real conflicts within the continent, which is to say, for as long as we are human. Collective conflicts naturally gravitate towards religious expressions, because religious rituals, rhetoric and myths are the most powerful ways that people have ever discovered to bind themselves together. They help us to understand, and to intensify, the fierce and inarticulate urges that hold people in friendship or separate them in enmity.

This has been illustrated very clearly in the history of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism since the foundation of Israel, in which religious parties have steadily become more powerful on both sides of the divide. Something of the same sort may be taking shape in eastern Europe, where hostility to immigrants is increasingly an ostentatiously “Christian” form.

This isn’t an argument that religion is necessarily destructive. That would be like arguing (as Plato actually did) that music necessarily stirs up violent passions. It can, and it can also bring peace.

But when religions bring peace, they do so by exploring their own resources, not by claiming that others have better answers, however obvious that may be to outsiders. A recent London School of Economics blog post on the role of evangelical Christians in the peace settlement in Northern Ireland shows how the effective mediators were those who worked entirely within their own tradition, reinterpreting, as Calvinists, the Bible texts that other Calvinists such as Ian Paisley had used to stir up communal hatred. The slogan “For God and Ulster” was countered with another: “For God and His glory alone”. You don’t get that effect by leaving God out of it.

The bright sunlit islands on Lidl’s packaging are not in the least exempt from religion in the real world. Orthodox Christianity, which the deleted crosses represent, is a hugely powerful force in Greek life. These are also the islands to which hundreds of thousands of mainly Muslim refugees aspire; on some of them they are penned in conditions which Pope Francis has described as like “concentration camps” – which shows that Christianity can be welcoming as well as exclusive. Ignoring all that won’t make the underlying problems any easier to solve. It’s a grandiloquent moral to draw from the packaging on supermarket yoghurt, but in the end the only way to avoid a clash of civilisations is to accept and understand European culture better, not to hope escape from all culture into a pasteurised future.

• Andrew Brown is a Guardian columnist