Bad FaithThe answer, in brief, is that moving on from atheism gave me
permission, as it were, to re-engage a religious imagination –
Schleiermacher’s sense and taste for the Infi nite, Tillich’s quest
for the ground of being. However, it did not easily re-engage
a belief in the Christian God. The position I had come to was
an appreciation of the unknowability of the divine. This left
me passionately agnostic. As it happens, I do fairly regularly go
to church – trying to pick the times and places that attend to
the mystery of things in great architecture, music and silence.
However, what you still have to reckon with are the repeated
expressions of doctrinal certainties that pepper the vast major-
ity of liturgies. They are not the same as the assertions of the
fundamentalist. But to an agnostic, they are still felt.
The very fi rst words you are likely to hear upon attending a
mass, communion, worship or family service are either, ‘In the
name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’, or, ‘The Lord
be with you’ – phrases that immediately encompass all sorts of
assertions about God. Then there will be the prayers of interces-
sion, the part of the service where the concerns of the world
and the people are rehearsed. It is a natural thing to want to do.
What doesn’t often seem to be asked is what kind of answer God
might be thought to give. Personally, I also fi nd the words of
many hymns problematic – when they read more like pop lyrics
than poetry. And then there is the main stumbling-block in the
service when people are invited to recite the creed – ‘I believe
in God ...’ and so on. Even uttering the credo – the ‘I believe’ –
leaves me wanting to add qualifi ers. By the end – ‘the holy cath-
olic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting’ – I have
run out of fi ngers to cross. (For which reason my strategy has
become just to go with the fl ow, to allow the whole experience
to affect me: it’s church, not a law court.)
There are a number of rejoinders that the minister or priest
would suggest in response to these complaints. First, it might
be said that a church is a Christian place of worship – for
believers – and so one should only expect Christian language to