I have a distinct memory of the first time I ever knowingly encountered outspoken scepticism about Christianity, in the playground of my primary school. The occasion is hard to fix exactly in time – it was sometime between Year 3 and Year 5 – but I know the place where it happened to within a couple of feet. The face and the tone, though not the name, of my interlocutor is similarly lodged in my mind.
“You worship the clouds,” he jibed, which I now realise was good preparation for about 95 per cent of popular atheist polemic. I cannot remember what, if anything, I said in response. I do remember feeling slightly unsettled. Christian belief was the sea in which I swam as a child. My Evangelical family prayed together and attended church at least once every week. Most of my close friends were from church. I wouldn’t say we lived in a Christian bubble, but active hostility to faith struck an extremely discordant note in my general experience of life – and this was 30 years ago, when the ambient culture was not as relentlessly antagonistic towards Christians as it has since become.
