Faith keeps you going, Kemi, but it doesn't grant wishes

There's an old joke about a minister caught up in a flood. "God will save me," he says, confidently turning away two boats and a helicopter.

- KAT BROWN

When he inevitably drowns, he asks God why he didn't save him. God replies: "I sent you two boats and a helicopter, what more do you want?"

I was reminded of this on hearing Kemi Badenoch speak about faith and religion. In an interview with the BBC's Amol Rajan, who is almost as omnipresent as Our Lord, she said her belief in God was gone, "like someone blew out a candle", when she followed the case of Elisabeth Fritzl in 2008.

"I couldn't stop reading this story. And I read her account, how she prayed every day to be rescued," Badenoch said. Elisabeth Fritzl was held hostage in her father's basement for 24 years, during which Josef Fritzl repeatedly raped her, fathering seven children. "And I thought, I was praying for all sorts of stupid things, and I was getting my prayers answered. I was praying to have good grades, my hair should grow longer, and I would pray for the bus to come on time so I wouldn't miss something.

"It's like, why were those prayers answered and not this woman's prayers?"

This rang many bells for me. Stupid prayers are the gift of the safe child: I prayed nightly for a horse. And when I was 10, I started drifting away from church. With black and white clarity, I judged every person in the congregation for, as I understood, not believing what they were saying or acting upon it.