Anyone who has ever watched British comedian
Frank Skinner would regard him as a very unlikely defender of religion. His
humour, full of explicit sexual references, is usually euphemistically described as “laddish”.

However, Skinner is a practicing Catholic,
and isn’t shy about admitting it. He has written and spoken publicly before about his faith, so it
didn’t come as a complete surprise to read that he’s been sticking up for
religion again, this time at
an event in Canterbury Cathedral.

Here’s a flavor
of what he had to say.

He described atheists
as “like those who deny global warming”.

“You might celebrate their right, and defend
their freedom of speech, to deny global warming – but if they’re wrong, and
millions of other people have taken their view, then it could end in a
terrible, terrible disaster for a lot of people,” he said.

Skinner also admitted that his comedian
colleagues were in the vanguard of making atheism seem culturally dominant.

He said: “On the comedy circuit, it’s
incredibly cool to be an atheist.

‘I’ve just been to the Edinburgh Fringe and
even if it was nothing to do with anything else they were saying, most comics
would take three or four minutes to explain they were atheists, just to tick
the box of “cool comic”.

Believers, he added, had ceded too many
principles to “rationalists”.

He said: ‘There’s too much apologising – and
I’m afraid the English Anglicans are bad at this – for the magic in religion,
making concessions on the virgin birth or the resurrection. Don’t give in to
them!

To applause from the audience, he said: ‘If
you believe in God all bets are off. The Red Sea can part. There’s a temptation
to give a bit of ground to rationality. But if you believe in God, why
shouldn’t there be angels?’

Skinner said that he saw his faith as a
challenge that made him a better person. “If it’s like a big woolly jumper, it
can’t be that important, can it? I don’t want religion to be a handrail, I want
it to be a precarious walk with no handrail,” he said.