You like to describe your religious affiliation as ‘lapsed Anglican’.
This, you feel, neatly encapsulates the contribution the Church of England made to your upbringing*, whilst hinting at the vast whirling storms of doubt you are now afflicted with.
Which centre mostly on the way you find it impossible to believe in Jesus.
You simply cannot bring yourself to see the Bible as anything other than a historical document, neither of which is conducive to believing in a virgin birth, stars, angels, donkeys, five thousand fishes, water based miracles, raising people from the dead, Mary Magdalene, thirty pieces of silver, the empty tomb and post crucifixion sightings. You darkly suspect the Gospels of being a sort of amalgamation of folk stories that at best describe something of the actions of any number of indigenous charismatic preachers. You think of Jesus, in fact, as something very similar to the phenomenon of Robin Hood.
There’s certainly a similar level of historical evidence to support their literal existence.
Every now and again, you do remember that the Bible is supposed to be divinely inspired.
But if you accept that the book of Genesis is at best an imperfect description of big bang theory written by people who hadn’t the benefit of reading either Charles Darwin or Stephen Hawking to help them make it more, how shall we say this, accurate, and you do, then you find no difficulty in feeling that, broadly speaking, the points the New Testament and the story of Jesus’ life makes are not necessarily invalidated by the fact that they are one big allegory.
After all, even Jesus told parables.
However, once you reached this conclusion, you found it very difficult to sit and listen to sermons which talked about Jesus as though he were a real person, and worse, that he lived just down the road at number 22.
You also felt that even in the dear old liberal Anglican tradition**, your views might not be accepted without comment.
And so you’ve been rather avoiding church ever since.
But you take an interest, you know? And you mis the singing.
And then, on holiday in Moscow, you also got the Star christened. As a Russian Orthodox christian.
So you very much feel that you are going to have to dunk your own head back into the muddy theological waters of your faith in order to at least educate the Star in the mysteries of the religion you have committed him to.
And the Church of England. Because a part of your protestant soul disapproves of icons.
Which should nicely mess with his head.
*Admittedly, it was a very positive contribution. Sorry about that, all the lapsed Catholics out there.
**Bits of the British capter, anyway.