I was christened in the Church of England. My father was Catholic, and my mother was Protestant. There was a time when those distinctions mattered considerably more than they probably do to many people today.
Religion was simply there. You went to church. You listened. You heard stories from the Bible and were taught what was right and wrong. Like most children, I accepted much of it because the adults around me told me it was true.
Then you get older, and you start asking questions.
That’s where things became more complicated for me.
Because today, if you ask whether I believe in God, my immediate answer would probably be:
No.
But that’s not quite true.
The God I stopped believing in
I don’t believe in the simple version of God I understood as a child: an old man somewhere above us, watching everything we do, answering prayers, rewarding good behaviour and eventually deciding where we go when we die.
As I grew older, I found that increasingly difficult to reconcile with the world around me.
If God controls everything, why does a child die? Why does one person’s prayer apparently get answered while somebody else’s doesn’t? Why do terrible things happen to decent people? Why have people killed one another for centuries while believing God was on their side?
These aren’t original questions. Human beings have been asking them for thousands of years.
But they’re my questions.
And I don’t think questioning something should automatically be regarded as rejecting it.
If a belief cannot survive being questioned, how strong was that belief in the first place?
God and religion aren’t necessarily the same thing
This is where I make an important distinction.
If God exists, God exists independently of the institutions human beings have constructed around belief. Religion is how human beings have attempted to understand, explain and organise that belief.
And human beings are complicated.
The Bible didn’t arrive on my kitchen table directly from God. Its books were written down, copied, collected, translated and interpreted by people over centuries.
Different Christians can read the same words and reach different conclusions. Different churches disagree with one another.
That doesn’t prove God doesn’t exist.
But it does make me cautious when another human being tells me with absolute certainty:
“This is what God wants.”
My immediate question is:
How do you know?
Perhaps we’ve misunderstood what some of it was for
There’s another possibility I find fascinating.
Religion may have performed enormously practical functions as societies developed.
Consider ancient religious rules around food, cleanliness, washing and behaviour. Today we understand bacteria, infection, contamination and public health. People thousands of years ago didn’t have that knowledge.
Some religious practices may therefore have had practical benefits as well as spiritual significance.
That doesn’t mean religion was simply an early public-health manual. Clearly it wasn’t. Nor does it mean we can confidently explain why every religious rule developed.
But it makes me wonder how many practices emerged from particular historical circumstances and were subsequently carried forward as permanent spiritual requirements.
That creates a question I cannot answer:
Which parts of religion represent timeless principles — and which reflect the societies in which they developed?
I don’t know.
And that’s precisely the point.
I understand why people go to church
It would be easy to turn this into an attack on organised religion.
That isn’t what I believe.
I’ve seen what churches can provide: community, friendship, comfort, somewhere to go when you’re grieving, people who notice when you haven’t turned up, rituals surrounding birth, marriage and death, and a sense that you’re part of something larger than yourself.
For someone who is frightened, lonely, bereaved or simply trying to make sense of life, that can be enormously valuable.
Modern society hasn’t necessarily found a good replacement for it. We can have hundreds of online connections and still be desperately lonely. We can communicate instantly with people around the world while barely knowing the person living next door.
Perhaps when church attendance declined, we didn’t just lose religion.
Perhaps we lost some community with it.
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But does attending church make someone a Christian?
Imagine two people.
One goes to church every Sunday. They know the prayers, know the Bible, and proudly describe themselves as Christian. But during the rest of the week they treat people badly. They’re dishonest, unkind and judgemental.
Now imagine somebody else.
They never attend church. They aren’t even certain God exists. But they help somebody who is struggling. They treat people with dignity. They forgive. They give without expecting anything in return. And when they’re wrong, they accept responsibility.
Which one is living closer to the message?
I know which one makes more sense to me.
Perhaps faith isn’t demonstrated by what building you enter on Sunday.
Perhaps it’s demonstrated by what you do on Monday.
The problem begins when questioning stops
This is where my difficulty with organised religion really sits.
Not with belief. Not with churches. Not with people practising their faith.
My difficulty begins when any institution says:
You must believe this. And you must not question it.
Questioning is fundamental to how I understand the world. I question politicians and governments. I question experts. I question things I read online.
Most importantly, I question myself.
Why should religion be the one part of life exempt from examination?
If there is a God, I find it difficult to believe that God would give human beings intelligence, curiosity and reason and then become offended when we use them.
Religion and power
Religion has provided extraordinary comfort and inspired enormous amounts of good. It has also been used by human beings to exercise power.
Kings have claimed authority from God. Wars have been justified through religion. Political movements have wrapped themselves in religious identity. People have been persecuted for believing the wrong thing — or believing nothing at all.
That doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about God.
It tells us quite a lot about people.
Human beings are exceptionally good at taking powerful ideas and using them to justify what they already want to do. Religion isn’t unique in that respect. Politics does it. Nationalism does it. Ideology does it.
The danger begins when somebody becomes so certain of their own righteousness that disagreement itself becomes unacceptable.
What about “Christian values”?
We’re hearing this phrase increasingly in political debate.
Britain is told that it needs to defend Christian values.
For many people, that is a completely sincere description of principles that genuinely shape how they live. I don’t dismiss that.
If Christian values mean compassion, forgiveness, helping strangers, caring for people in difficulty, personal responsibility and treating others as we would want to be treated ourselves, there is plenty there worth defending.
But those principles aren’t exclusively Christian. A Muslim can live by them. A Jew can live by them. A Hindu can live by them. An atheist can live by them.
Perhaps the values matter more than the label.
My concern begins when religious identity becomes political identity — when Christian, Muslim or any other religious label becomes less about how I should live and more about distinguishing us from them.
That’s when faith risks becoming tribalism wearing religious clothing.
So what do I actually believe?
Do I believe there is a man in the sky controlling everything?
No.
Do I believe every religious teaching should be accepted without question?
No.
Do I believe any religious institution has a monopoly on truth?
No.
But do I believe there might be something greater than us?
Possibly.
And perhaps that contradiction is where I’ve ended up.
I have something in my head that I still sometimes call God.
Not a person. Not necessarily a supernatural being.
More like a guiding light. A reminder of the person I should try to be.
A voice that asks:
Is this right?
Are you treating this person fairly?
Could you have done better?
You could call that conscience. You could call it morality. You could call it accumulated human wisdom.
Someone else might call it God.
I’m increasingly comfortable admitting:
I don’t know.
Maybe “I don’t know” is enough
Religion often offers certainty.
I don’t have that certainty.
I don’t know what happens when we die. I don’t know whether there is a creator. I don’t know whether prayer changes anything beyond the person praying. I don’t know whether the universe has a purpose.
And I’ve stopped feeling that I need to pretend otherwise.
There is something liberating about saying:
I don’t know.
Because once you admit that, you can start listening.
You can question and change your mind. You can respect someone else’s belief without pretending it must also be yours. And you can disagree with someone’s religion without believing you have to disrespect the person practising it.
Certainty can be comforting.
But perhaps humility has value too.
But I still believe in the message
This is where I’ve ended up.
I don’t know whether there is a God.
I don’t know whether any human being really knows.
But I know compassion matters. Forgiveness matters. Community matters. Helping somebody when they’re struggling matters. Taking responsibility for your actions matters. Treating people with dignity matters.
And hope matters.
Perhaps that’s something modern society should think carefully about.
Because if traditional religious belief continues to decline, we shouldn’t automatically throw away everything that came with it.
We still need community. We still need moral responsibility. We still need somewhere to turn when life becomes frightening.
We still need hope.
Perhaps we don’t need to believe exactly what our grandparents believed to retain those things.
Perhaps we simply need to understand why they mattered.
So when someone asks whether I believe in God, I’m no longer sure “no” is the right answer.
Perhaps the most truthful answer is:
I don’t know.
I don’t believe in God in the way I was once taught to.
But I haven’t stopped believing in compassion, forgiveness, responsibility, community and hope.
And if those were always supposed to be the important parts of the message —
perhaps I haven’t stopped believing after all.
A personal reflection
Third Act Life usually looks beyond the headlines at the institutions, arguments and assumptions shaping our lives. Occasionally I step away from the headlines and question some of my own assumptions too.
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