How To Be An Agnostic
it all. You’re not just risking your opinion but your community,
the place where you once belonged. The issue or experience that
caused a fi ne fi ssure quickly becomes a visible crack and then an
existential rupture because everything is connected. There are
totemic issues – often associated with sexual morality because
sex is about intimate matters which, by virtue of being so inti-
mate, are explosive and powerful. To transgress them is almost
unforgivable. Every religious community has such lines in the
sand. Cross them and you put yourself on the outside.
The psychological theory of attachment between parents and
children helps illuminate the experience. A good-enough parent
is one who provides the child not only with a secure base, but
also with the encouragement to explore beyond that base. The
child, thereby, learns who they are as an individual, while at
the same time remaining confi dent that parental concern for
them will survive their moves away, towards independence.
The quality of the attachment needs, therefore, to be accom-
modating not rigid, characterised by trust not just rules. Trust is
particularly important since it tells the child that they will not
only continue to receive love but that they will continue to be
worthy of being loved too.
But things can go wrong. The psychologist John Bowlby lists
the kind of behaviour in parents that causes children to ques-
tion their worth and which leads to a breakdown in loving
trust. It’s remarkably like what goes wrong between religious
institutions and believers. The parent may be unresponsive to
the child’s sense of what it needs. Does not so much ecclesiasti-
cal moral teaching feel like that too? The parent threatens the
child with a withdrawal of love, in order to control it – which
seems not unlike crude tales of divine judgement. The parent
scares the child with physical violence, actual or intimated – a
bit like the god who would punish you forever. The parent
induces guilt in the child. Do not churches do all these things
to those of whom it disapproves? Is there a religious institution
that is not more than capable of doing the same? The analogy
suggests that priests and rabbis, ministers and gurus frequently