Honestly, when it comes to programming languages, I'm not religious either. Not zealously in favor of assembly language, not a h8r of higher-level languages like C.
Ackshooly, C is about as close to assembly language as you can get; it's actually pretty low-level as so-called HLLs go. Some statements actually map 1-to-1 to assembly code. Others are so close that it hardly matters. Plus for those people who use the high-level constructs in MASM32, like if/elseif, loops, etc., the code that actually gets generated isn't a whole lot different than the corresponding C constructs. It all gets boiled down to jumps, dontcha know.
I used to write COBOL, a language much maligned in the programmer "community". However, I still say that it was the best tool to use for the jobs I was tasked with doing. To all the detractors of COBOL, I challenge them to write an understandable and, more importantly, maintanable payroll application in C++, Pascal or whatever.