Ruminations of a Boy in the Chapel at St Stithians

Aweh, My Dearly Beloved Fellow Ruminants & Groupies,

We are generally advised not to speak publicly about religion.
It’s bad manners. It’s divisive. It upsets people who prefer their certainties undisturbed.

Unfortunately, not pissing into the wind has never struck me as a sufficient reason to stay silent. It is, in fact, a recurring theme of this blog. So here we are.

This is not a confession of faith, nor a renunciation of it. It’s a reflection on how compulsory chapel, specifically Methodist chapel at St Stithians, quietly shaped the way I now think about authority, institutions, certainty, and the people who insist they already have the answers.

Compulsory chapel

St Stithians. Methodist. Respectable. Solid. Very earnest.
Chapel was compulsory.

We stood. We sang hymns with alarming enthusiasm for people who hadn’t chosen to be there. We bowed our heads on cue. We were offered a moral universe that arrived fully assembled, confident, orderly, and largely uninterested in difficult questions.

Goodness was asserted rather than explored. Meaning was delivered, not debated. The tone was unmistakable: this has been settled; your role is to absorb it politely.

As a schoolboy, I complied. Children with restless, anxious minds but not revolutionaries often do. Compliance is not agreement; it’s adaptive behaviour. You learn when to nod, when to stay quiet, and when to file thoughts away for later.

And something subtle happened in those wooden pews. I noticed the gap.

Between sermons about humility and institutions extremely sure of themselves.
Between moral certainty and the messy, compromised reality of human lives.
Between words and incentives.

Chapel didn’t make me rebellious.
It sharpened my ability to think for myself.

Ritual without inquiry

The problem with compulsory chapel isn’t religion. It’s belief without inquiry.
Recitation replaces curiosity. Ritual replaces wrestling. Obedience stands in for understanding. The implicit message isn’t that this matters, so think hard, it’s this is settled, now behave.

For some people, this produces comfort. For others, particularly those inclined toward systems, evidence, inconvenient questions and a distrust of reverence, it produces something else entirely: a permanent wariness of institutions that demand assent before explanation.

That wariness does not remain confined to religion. It resurfaces later when governments announce grand energy transitions without balance sheets. When corporates wrap themselves in ESG virtue while quietly arbitraging responsibility. When moral language is deployed as a substitute for thinking.

You learn, almost reflexively, to ask:

• What assumptions are being smuggled in here?
• Who benefits?
• What am I not supposed to question?

It wasn’t the content of the sermons that stayed with me; it was the discomfort of having to accept without asking. Those questions were first rehearsed, silently, in the chapel.

Recognising familiar instincts later

Much later, I began to recognise this instinct in others.

Rowan Atkinson, for example, is often mistaken for an anti-religious provocateur. He isn’t. His real objection is far more precise: the idea that religion deserves legal protection from mockery. His defence of satire and the right to offend is not adolescent rebellion; it’s a mature refusal to grant immunity to belief. That instinct feels deeply familiar.

John Cleese is even closer to home. His Anglican school chapel experience left him with a lifelong allergy to dogma and unexamined authority, but not with cynicism. Life of Brian is not an attack on Jesus. It’s a scalpel applied to human groupthink, ritualised certainty, and our enthusiasm for following loudly and thinking quietly. Cleese laughs where others rage, but the diagnosis is exact.

Christopher Hitchens took the same raw material and chose confrontation. For him, compulsory belief was an assault on intellectual honesty itself. Religion became not merely wrong but morally suspect. I don’t share his appetite for perpetual combat, but I recognise the source of his fury.

Where Hitchens met ritual with fire, Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett brought scalpels, each slicing away at unfounded belief with different tools, but the same surgical intent: to defend thought over obedience.

What chapel actually left behind

Looking back, I think compulsory chapel made me suspicious of reverence.  Not reverence earned through insight or compassion, but reverence demanded. The kind that expects silence rather than thought, posture rather than engagement, agreement rather than understanding. Once you’ve been trained to perform reverence on schedule, you start noticing how often it is used to shut people up.

That suspicion didn’t harden me. It loosened me. It left space for questions to breathe.
It evolved, over time, into a willingness to question solemnity itself and eventually into a readiness to piss into the wind when certainty became too loud, too confident, too pleased with itself.

Which is probably why Life of Brian made me laugh out loud.

The Jehovah scene, in particular, lands perfectly if you’ve grown up in enforced seriousness. A single misheard word, instantly sanctified, defended with violence, ritualised without reflection. It’s not blasphemy, it’s anthropology. Cleese and company weren’t mocking belief; they were mocking the human reflex to turn scripture into doctrine and obedience into virtue.

If you’ve sat through enough compulsory chapel, you don’t feel offended by that scene.
You feel recognised.

This is why I’ve never been comfortable with either militant atheism or lazy spirituality.

Both feel too finished. Too sure of themselves.

From chapel to questions

If chapel trained me in anything, it was quiet dissent.
It taught me how authority speaks. How ritual can conceal emptiness. How moral language can be used to close conversations rather than open them. And how valuable it is, later in life, to ask questions calmly and without apology.

• Why this project?
• Why this policy?
• Why this technology?
• Why this moral claim?
• What happens when reality refuses to cooperate?

Those questions now shape how I think about energy systems, economics, ageing, money, politics, and myself.

The boy in the chapel learned how to stand still.
The man learned how to interrogate and piss into the wind.

A final, irreverent word

This is not an argument against religion. It’s an argument against unearned certainty, religious, political, corporate, or personal.

If belief matters, it should survive scrutiny.
If meaning matters, it should tolerate doubt.
If an institution deserves loyalty, it should welcome uncomfortable questions.

Compulsory chapel didn’t teach me what to believe. It taught me not to trust anyone who insists the thinking has already been done.

And if that occasionally involves pissing into the wind, well, at least it proves which way the breeze is really blowing.

Until next week,

Bruce