“I was a student at Wadham, and I was drawn there partly because it had reputation for being a really Marxist place in those days. I was a Marxist-atheist in those days as well. Back in the 1960s, that’s what every young person was.”

So Alister McGrath, Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University, leading Christian apologist, and author of over 30 books including The Dawkins Delusion, described his early days studying Chemistry at Oxford. It was here, he told me, that he made the transition to Christianity. “Coming to Oxford, I suddenly realised the world was bigger than I thought, and it made me do a lot of rethinking. To cut a long story short, I moved away from atheism towards Christianity, basically because Christianity seemed to me to offer a better way of looking at the world. It was a very intellectual conversion.”

As we talked, sat in opposite armchairs in a room above the Harris Manchester College Chapel, McGrath elaborated on how this change was woven with doubts about the principles of his youth. “If you’re locked into an intellectual way of looking at the world, it limits what you see. If you read Arthur Koestler’s works, he talks about his own experience where the world seemed very simple but also very limited, and he came to the view that the world cannot be taken in by any single theory. That was really what I experienced. I still use Marxism – it’s very good at social analysis – but there seemed vast areas of life where it didn’t give good answers.”

“If you want to be cynical”, McGrath smiled wryly, “You could say that what I’ve done is substitute one big picture for another. What I think I realised was I’d stepped into the wrong big picture and it wasn’t big enough.” One important influence on this conclusion was the student community he found in Oxford. “In the Oxford intellectual environment, people talk about things a lot: over lunch, over dinner, in the pubs. I found myself being exposed to ideas I had not thought through before. Oxford is that kind of catalyst.” Another was a revaluation of what science could offer. “I started to read about history and philosophy of science, and though I had thought science gave very simple, crisp, clear answers to questions, looking at the history and philosophy I found science was much more malleable and open-ended than I’d realized.”

This debate over the role of science became one of many that McGrath would grapple with in both academic and apologetic capacity for over 30 years. Asked about the state of Christian apologetics today, he continues in his measured tone. “Apologetic literature needs to be acutely alert to the questions people are asking, to the anxieties they are expressing. It must be constantly asking how the Christian faith can be interpreted and explained to really highlight the way it connect up with these questions. It not about reworking Christianity; it’s much more about trying to say, look, there is this big theme in Christianity which connects very will to this and to this, and hasn’t been explained very well. So apologetics needs to be immersed in the deep structures of Christianity, but exquisitely sensitive to the questions people are asking.”

In a word, what is the biggest question Christianity faces right now? “Relevance. It’s a ‘so what’ question. Lots of Christian apologists are very good at defending the rationality of faith, but so what? You’ve got to show there is existential traction, that it really relates to them.” He frowns slightly, before continuing slowly. “Partly, this is because we live in a post-modern situation, and post-modernity often asks not ‘is this right?’ but ‘does this work’. That’s actually a very important question to ask: what difference does Christianity make to my life?”

In his teenage years, growing up in Northern Ireland, McGrath described how the main difference Christianity seemed to make was dividing society. “I was there in the late 1960s, and it was a time of rising religious tension; what we euphemistically call ‘the Troubles’ kicked off  after I left. To my way of thinking, this illustrated that religion was divisive, a source of violence, and it reinforced my Marxist concerns about religion, that it was something which sedated people and prevented them from asking big questions. Northern Ireland reinforced my sense that atheism was the obvious option for any thinking person.”

Is anything unique, then, about the Oxford environment which set McGrath thinking differently? “Having spent some time as an academic in London, I’ve noticed Oxford is very good at forcing students of different disciplines to talk to each other: the college system creates those cross-discipline friendships and conversations. I think it also helps research, bringing people of different backgrounds together and producing innovation across disciplinary boundaries. Oxford has this capacity to generate ideas, spark people off .”

Germany’s relationship with freedom of expression has long been a problematic one. The Nazi period followed by the GDR impressed the importance of it so deeply into the national conscience that they wrote it into their constitution: “There shall be no censorship.” But of course no state is really without censorship, and the same history has made Germany quick to axe content it thinks touches a political nerve. So it draws a line between freedom of expression and what it calls ‘Schmähkritik,’ which best translates as ‘abusive criticism’. It is this line that German comedian Jan Böhmermann claimed to be illuminating as he read out a poem about Turkish President Recep Erdoğan in which he called the President a viewer of child pornography and accused him of bestiality. The result: Erdoğan is pressing charges against the comedian under paragraph 103 of the German penal code, which pertains to offending foreign heads of state.

Böhmermann’s poem is crass, it’s racist and it’s homophobic. He prefaces it by saying “Now this is what you’re not allowed to do,” so he’s clearly aware of the legal ramifi cations. So why do two-thirds of the German population believe it should be thrown out of court? Simply put, context is key. Böhmermann did not choose Erdoğan at random, previously the Turkish President tried to have another piece of German satire censored, a song that highlighted his oppression of Kurds, Christians, women and journalists. Böhmermann points out with sarcastic naivety that perhaps the Turkish President does not understand the definition of satire, as no such shows are to be found in his country, and gives his poem as an “example” of its limits. It is true, you will not find any satirical programmes poking fun at Erdoğan in Turkey. Any criticism of the President can lead to criminal prosecution, loss of livelihood, or worse. Possibly the pettiest example being the man threatened with time in prison for creating an internet image comparing Erdoğan’s facial expressions to Gollum. Bülent Mumay, a prominent Turkish journalist, was asked whether there was a battle going on in Turkey between the government and journalists. “It’s no battle,” he replied, “it’s a massacre.”

One very distinct memory compels me to defend Böhmermann’s poem against punishment, especially by a megalomaniac like Recep Erdoğan. My father is a comedian, and I remember how we were on holiday when we heard about the attacks on Charlie Hebdo. I recall the floods of emails from artists and performers trying to organise a response. I remember him sitting down to draft a letter for PEN, something along the lines of a declaration of solidarity with comedians everywhere, stating they wouldn’t be intimidated into silence. The large part of me knew this was the right thing to do. The idea that fear might stop my dad from making a joke was grotesque enough to be laughable. At the same time that fear had already rooted itself deep in my brain. I wanted to say please, please don’t put your name on anything, don’t make any jokes about it, just don’t give anyone an excuse to make you a target. Seeing him with a pen was like watching him on a tightrope, but I tucked this part of me away because showing I was afraid would be unfair. Because no matter how shaken I felt, planting the seed of self-censorship in my dad would be a betrayal. The idea that this feeling could be a part of everyday life, the crippling urge to play it safe, to self-censor for fear of the consequences, makes my stomach tighten.

Böhmermann has not been attacked or physically threatened, but he is being intimidated. Erdoğan’s obsession with quashing criticism is spreading beyond Turkey’s borders. His position in the migrant crisis given the EU deal with Turkey (in which Germany played no small part) has given him a taste of leverage in Europe. He must not be allowed to exploit it. It is uncomfortable to defend such a crude example of comedy, but since when has satire been about comfort? Other German artists have come out in solidarity with Böhmermann, stating: “Discussions about and criticism of Jan Böhmermann’s poem belong in the country’s newspapers, not in its courts. Art cannot happen in a climate where artists have to think about whether their creations will lead to criminal charges being brought against them, in which they begin to either censor themselves or be censored. It is the work of art and of satire to always be testing societal boundaries and provoking public discussion.”

They further demand that para. 103 be struck from the German penal code, calling it outdated. Because history has taught us that mocking authority is important; whether it’s a God, a president, or even David Cameron and a dead pig. Because when the jesters start being led to the gallows, that’s when you should be really afraid.