by George Owers, The Critic
The bromides of secular materialism are not enough to explain and justify life
As late as the twilight twenties, it would be hard to overstate how ignorant I was of Christianity. I had been brought up in a secular household, and had done little more than pick up scraps here and there. At school we sang hymns and were expected to mumble the Lord’s Prayer at assemblies, and I had of course attended various nativity plays and carol concerts. I have some vague memory of a vicar talking to me and my class when I was at primary school: he seemed well-meaning but dim and even at that tender age I could detect the vague whiff of earnest desperation and bland liberal platitudes.
The nuggets that one could pick up from such sources — some vague idea of God being a benevolent celestial paterfamilias who had sent a chap called Jesus, his son, to save us by the apparently inexplicable means of getting crucified; the odd parable from the gospels; a handful of Old Testament stories; and a hazy notion that a bloke called Paul had been through some miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus — were the limits of my knowledge of the religion by law established in my own country.
Generally thereafter I didn’t think much about religion at all except to be casually hostile. I had regular twinges of adolescent sub-New Atheist outrage about “fairy stories” and “superstitious gobbledegook” in reaction to my occasional oblique interactions with Christianity — outrage based on almost total ignorance of what I was sneering at — and that was the limit of my engagement. Christianity to me seemed to be either slightly sinister and obscure, or in its Anglican guise too often nice but beige and a bit stupid, purveyed by terrifyingly dull, suburban simpletons who sang embarrassing songs about how God had put the “cold in the snowflake” and “the hump upon the camel”. It stank of unappealing school dinners and undermanned tombola stalls.