There’s an old joke about a minister caught up in a flood. “God will save me,” he says, confidently turning away two boats and a helicopter.
When he inevitably drowns, he asks God why he didn’t save him. God replies, “I sent you two boats and a helicopter, what more do you want?”
I was reminded of this on hearing Kemi Badenoch speak about faith and religion. In an interview with the BBC’s Amol Rajan, who is almost as omnipresent as Our Lord, she said her belief in God was gone, “like someone blew out a candle” when she followed the case of Elisabeth Fritzl in 2008.
“I couldn’t stop reading this story. And I read her account, how she prayed every day to be rescued,” Badenoch said. Elisabeth Fritzl was held hostage in her father’s basement for 24 years, during which Josef Fritzl repeatedly raped her, fathering seven children. “And I thought, I was praying for all sorts of stupid things, and I was getting my prayers answered. I was praying to have good grades, my hair should grow longer, and I would pray for the bus to come on time so I wouldn’t miss something.
“It’s like, why were those prayers answered and not this woman’s prayers?”
This rang many bells for me. Stupid prayers are the gift of the safe child: I prayed nightly for a horse. And when I was 10, I started drifting away from church. With black and white clarity, I judged every person in the congregation for, as I understood, not believing what they were saying or acting upon it.
I’m probably the opposite of Badenoch in that I do believe in God but am no longer a cultural Christian. I love Christmas and holy music, but I do not consider Christianity to be a sign of Britishness more than any other religion – except perhaps paganism, being the historic traditions of the British Isles.
But I do very much understand the shocks that can lead people to leave the church. I grew up with women grudgingly being allowed to become ministers, and awakened to gay people being sidelined. I read a viral letter from a musician to the radio personality Laura Schlessinger about her singling out homosexuality as a biblical sin (sample line: “I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?”). Religion’s pick-and-choose nature highlighted the contradictions I had seen as a child, and I didn’t bother with church again until my late twenties.
I found my way back to faith after a series of deaths, and in places that acknowledged the contradictions that exist in the Bible and, well, humanity. Arguing with God over what is fair is immortalised in poetry (John Donne) and song, including Kate Bush, whose magical “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)” marked its fortieth anniversary this week. Many people move away from religion. Moving away from faith is a different matter.
In psychotherapist Edith Eger’s 2017 book The Choice, she described how “drawing on my inner world” helped her to survive Auschwitz, Mauthausen and the death march. “I found hope and faith in life within me, even when I was surrounded by starvation and torture and death,” she said. Her sister Magda lost her faith, yet somehow, Eger did not: “I want to keep alive the part of me that feels wonder, that wonders, until the very end.”
When I look at the news, I want to wonder. And so, I turn away from Elisabeth Fritzl’s father – rightly left in prison to rot – and towards the wonder of her courage. She has started a new chapter with her children, under new names, with a media ban and security protection. The true strength is hers.
This is what I understand that I didn’t know when I was 10: God and religion are not the same. People may trumpet their “Christianity”, but that doesn’t mean they are good people or even that they live by what is written in the Bible. The Christian right, in the US particularly, leans heavily on abortion. Yet Exodus 21 v 22 to 25, from where “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” comes from, indicates that a pregnant woman’s life is worth more than her unborn child. Politicians might reflect on this.
Badenoch might go on to find a new understanding with faith, if not with religion. God is the indefinable spirit that helps humanity through the hardest times. Whether as a “Good Orderly Direction” or the “Great Outdoors”, or an old man with a beard, God gives us the strength to be of use and to recognise the miracles around us. Sometimes they’re a rainbow. Sometimes they’re a boat.
As the American children’s TV hero Mr Rogers said, “Look for the helpers.” And as Bruce Springsteen said: “Still at the end of every hard-earned day / People find some reason to believe.”
