A PRIMARY school teacher in Northern Ireland in the mid-1970s posed his class of nine-year-old boys a tricky theological question: “Hands up those of you who think Protestants believe in God,” he said.
Only five of the thirty-two Roman Catholic children in the class raised their hands. The rest either didn’t know or, for one reason or another, imagined that Protestants worshipped some unknown deity.
I was one of the ill-informed children and, as the teacher tried to explain that Protestants believed in exactly the same God that we supposedly did, clearly remember experiencing a rising sense of shame at my ignorance.
There was another uneasy feeling. Why, if Protestants were also Christians, were they in different schools; why did we never meet any of