Invoked a widespread consensus?

Is this "consensus" in the author's imagination? Or an actual existence?

Background info:

In the previous chapter, when trying to explain the shifting moral
Zeitgeist, I invoked a widespread consensus of liberal, enlightened,
decent people. I made the rosy-spectacled assumption that 'we' all
broadly agree with this consensus, some more than others, and I
had in mind most of the people likely to read this book, whether
they are religious or not. But of course, not everybody is of the
consensus (and not everybody will have any desire to read my
book). It has to be admitted that absolutism is far from dead.
Indeed, it rules the minds of a great number of people in the world
today, most dangerously so in the Muslim world and in the
incipient American theocracy (see Kevin Phillips's book of that
name). Such absolutism nearly always results from strong religious
faith, and it constitutes a major reason for suggesting that religion
can be a force for evil in the world.