I think it does apply to the debate about religion, in that it's a crabbed novelist who pulls the shutters down and says, there's no other thing.
The current neglect may have as much to do with the notorious critics crabbed, sometimes contradictory and dogmatic style.
Sometimes called amateurish, it is densely drawn and washed, often with a large amount of text in a somewhat crabbed handwriting.
Stylistically, the discourse veers abruptly from passages of sublime purple prose to crabbed note-book jottings.
We do not want crabbed specialists.
It is a depressing, crabbed and mean picture.
How the vision of youth can fall prey to crabbed middle age!
I am sure that there were some ideas of his own struggling to emerge from that rather crabbed prose.
