Education, Mildness, and Apostasy

“By the time I finished school I was an imperfectly informed but convinced socialist, pacifist, and agnostic…

I had been brought up as a member of the Church of England, liking God. He knew everything about me but was Love and he was Understanding, so it would be hard to do anything for which he would not forgive me. In the book of Bible stories from which my grandmother read to us on Sundays, he was a figure of remarkable benevolence manifesting himself in a landscape remarkable for its beautiful sunsets, and later, in the Bible itself and in Beckton Church, he was a less material, more complex development of the same spirit.

I have friends who turned their backs on the churches in which they were brought up because of the churches’ irrational rigours; I was able to drift out of mine so easily because of its mildness.”

-from “Instead of a Letter” (1963) by Diana Athill