TV’s funniest Christian takes on the ‘Dawkins is cool’ crowd – and they don’t have a prayer!
A Comedian’s Prayer Book Frank Skinner
Hodder & Stoughton €11.99 ★★★★★
Most topical comedy billed as ‘cutting-edge’ is really just a giggling echo of fashionable opinion. This is particularly true where religion is involved: you can rely on comics to follow the hand-me-down line of Richard Dawkins, rather than view the subject afresh. Comedy tends to be reductive: faced with mystery, it tries to see through it.
On the radio a week or two ago, I happened to hear Monty Python’s Eric Idle, who apparently still identifies as a comedian. He was on a jokey panel, talking about science and religion.
‘Religion is an attempt to describe the universe from way back in the past, two thousand, three thousand years ago, and science has now updated it,’ he announced, in his smug, knowing manner. ‘Science tells us that 96% of the universe is dark matter, so only 4% of the universe is visible. So God is clearly hiding in the other 96%!’
The BBC Radio 4 audience tittered obediently, as they are trained to do. I thought of them, and of Eric Idle, as I was reading Frank Skinner’s wonderfully sharp new book. In one prayer, he asks God to ‘Forgive their Richard Dawkins-is-so-cool trend-following superficiality, their uninformed criticisms, their
‘I’ve written a prayer book, …no one can accuse me of being too commercial’
arrogant certainty, and let them see that, as it turned out, I was right all along.’
Frank Skinner is both a first-rate comedian and a practising Roman Catholic. It’s an unusual combination. ‘I’ve been a professional comedian for over 30 years,’ he writes in his introduction, ‘and, during that time, the religious believers I’ve met among my fellow japesters would, if assembled, just about fill a Vauxhall Corsa’.
A Comedian’s Prayer Book is just that: a short, snappy book of Christian prayers, delivered from his distinctive viewpoint, wheedling out the truth. ‘I’ve written a prayer book,’ he says. ‘At least no one can accuse me of being too commercial.’
It’s a notably brave thing for anyone to do, let alone a comedian. ‘There are few men who dare publish to the world the prayers they make to Almighty God,’ observed the great French philosopher Montaigne, back in the 16th Century. Braver still, in a way, to couch those prayers in the quick-fire language of comedy, rather than hide behind something more pious. Skinner compares himself to the court jester on a medieval Christian pilgrimage: he hopes to add a touch of humanity to their lofty piety.
Happily he does not try to water down religion into something more heart-warming and Thought-For-The-Dayish. He is sick of what he calls ‘belief-lite’, in which everything is kept acceptably vague and nothing can be seen to challenge the agnostic status quo.
‘The modern equivalent of bearing witness sounds something like, “I don’t believe in God, exactly, but I do feel there might be a sort of Universal Will that in some way generates a positive energy that, in a sense, informs our moral attitudes and what one might call spiritual instincts,”’ he writes.
Though he is full of niggling doubts, Skinner is, more often than not, on the side of the traditionalists. He goes to Mass; he kneels; he sometimes prays with a rosary; he reads the Bible every day, and finds it ‘a rattling good read’; he refuses to disregard the unquantifiable. ‘Weird-in-a-good-way is one of my favourite religious categories,’ he writes. ‘I like my religion to feel like poetry rather than prose… I don’t like it cosy.’
Skinner knows that he and his fellow Christians are, for the most part, considered naff. The world is ruled by unbelievers. ‘It has long bothered me that atheists sit, metaphorically, on a leather Chesterfield in an oakpanelled exclusive club, sharing highbrow insights with George Bernard Shaw and Philip Pullman, while I find myself in Spudulike with Cliff Richard.’
Like that brilliantly witty Christian writer GK Chesterton, Skinner embraces paradox, and likes to question modern society’s faith in the rational. ‘Reason itself is a matter of faith,’ said Chesterton. ‘It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.’
I think Skinner would go along with that sentiment. He is surprisingly forthright in his dislike of the vanity of contemporary mores: the Oprah world of ‘my truth’ and ‘my feelings’. Religion offers a loss of self. He sees it as
‘the antithesis of modernity. It challenges the fundamental concept of the 21st Century: the cult of the significant individual. The aim, instead, is to un-me oneself’.
In one of his later prayers, he congratulates God on ‘your post-Enlightenment decision to allow yourself to become unfashionable’. He sees it as a return to essentials. ‘Let science, drugs and the sexual revolution put on their sell-out main auditorium spectaculars. You’re happy with your enthusiastic devoteees in the Studio Theatre. We can hear the boom of the showstoppers coming through the wall from next door, but it only makes us feel closer, to you and to each other.’
Skinner’s prayers often follow this format – he surfs on a wave of oneliners before coming to rest in a quieter, more contemplative cove.
The tone is unashamedly chatty; some might think it a bit too chatty. ‘I do worry about boring you,’ he apologises to God. At one point, he suggests a suitable catchphrase for the Almighty would be ‘I’ll be the judge of that.’ At another, he lists his ‘Top Three Favourite Qualities of God’, which are ‘1. Loving. 2 Interesting and 3. Defiantly uncool.’
Yet the questions he raises are serious, and central to Christian theology, and he expresses them much more pithily than most professional theologians. For instance, is the act of Christian worship corrupted by being an act of insurance, performed with half an eye to reaping benefits in the afterlife? How can any soul remain happy in heaven knowing people they love are suffering in hell?
And how can a conscientious Christian accept God’s sporadic acts of merciless cruelty? ‘The Abraham Isaac
‘The Abraham-Isaac story hurts me every time I read it’
story hurts me every time I read it,’ he confesses, referring to the terrible tale of God asking Abraham to kill his only son, Isaac, to prove his faith. ‘Do I admire Abraham for his religious conviction in this episode? If I do then I think I also have to admire suicide-bombers.’
How can Abraham’s willingness to kill his son be squared with the biblical injunction ‘Thou shalt not kill’? Skinner is so troubled by this story that he has long dreaded one of his atheist friends might challenge him over it. Happily, none of them ever has. ‘That’s the great thing about arguing with them; they’ve rarely done the groundwork.’
Even when he tackles the stickiest Christian quandaries, he continues to crack jokes galore. Worrying about the famous passage where Jesus states that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, he looks for a get-out clause. Might a solution be found in state-of-the-art kitchen utensils? ‘One could liquidise a camel and then part the surface of the syrupy residue Red Sea-style, with a needle turned pointy-end upwards…’
For some, the book may be too relentlessly jocular, but at least its title offers fair warning. And though most of the humour lies in the doubts and quibbles – you might almost say the Devil has all the best jokes – this only serves to make his quieter, more private observations all the more touching. Real faith, he seems to suggest, is not just beyond jokes, but beyond words. ‘I never hear your voice – no mighty wind – or, if I do, I don’t recognise it, but I have sensed you in the silence.’ Faith may even lie in moments of doubt. ‘Perhaps if I believed better, I’d have a lot less to say about belief.’
‘When I pray, words do sometimes seem a bit cumbersome, even inappropriate,’ he writes. At another point, he tells God, ‘I knelt tonight, to present my lack of faith... But, sometimes, you intervene. I honestly think you intervene... somewhere in the swirl of me, you also become present.’
This is a fine, brave book, beautifully expressed. Richard Dawkins had better look to his laurels.