Fun, faith and family with Anne Atkins

Christian author, broadcaster and vicar’s wife Anne Atkins has left London for Oxford, where her husband Shaun has been appointed as director of Christian education at St Andrew’s church, Linton Road.

You probably think you know all there is to know about Anne Atkins and her views. You may have heard her often controversial but always thought provoking Thought for the Day pieces on Radio 4’s Today programme, or read her columns in the Daily Telegraph or the Daily Express or are a fan of her books. Wherever you turn in the media, it seems Anne is there these days, espousing her no-nonsense approach to faith and family life.

But despite the media’s attempts to pigeonhole her as a ‘family values campaigner’ she is full of surprises. Her latest book, Child Rearing for Fun, is a case in point. You might (and I certainly did) have expected Anne the vicar’s wife and staunch supporter of the family to be against working mothers. Not a bit of it. The book celebrates working mothers and places its emphasis on enjoying the time you spend with your children, not worrying about ‘quality time’ or ‘quantity time’.

She has always worked, despite having five children (the youngest is just 22 months) and her decision to do so is rooted firmly in her faith.

‘Its clear from Genesis 1 and Proverbs 31 that both men and women are created to work and Paul specifically says women who do not provide for their family are worse than unbelievers. I am created to work, I always had an urge to work.

‘I’m not saying full time parents aren’t working, of course they are, but for me it was also a financial necessity, as it is for all clergy families these days.’

She was also a strong supporter of women’s ordinations, though she believes that synod should not have agreed to it when it did.

‘I was passionately in favour of women’s ordination, I wanted to see it very much but I couldn’t have voted for it because it flies in the face of what Paul says about unity and sensitivity to other’s consciences. If two thirds of synod forced one third of synod to do what they believed to be wrong, then it doesn’t seem consistent with Christian teaching. I didn’t personally think it was wrong or unbiblical but I don’t believe we should have forced this view on others.’

Anne studied at Oxford, where she met her future husband, Shaun. She went on to train as an actress and played alongside other future film and TV stars such as Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis.

It was when she had her first child she turned to writing though, as she says, it took her three children to finish the book, which is a study of the roles of men and women from a Biblical point of view.

This led in turn to the beginning of her broadcasting career.

‘I first started doing broadcasting through publicity for the book I was doing. I had been asked some years before to do a Thought for the Day, but I thought then it was a bit wishy-washy so I wasn’t terribly interested. But then five or six years later, David Winter suggested me again. We’d met doing something else together. So I first went on in 1996 and my first Thought for the Day was about legalising prostitution. I had asked before what I was allowed to say and what I wasn’t, and was I told I could say what I liked and I thought, great, I’ll go for it.’

But it was when she spoke out on Thought for the Day against a service at Southwark Cathedral celebrating the Lesbian and Gay Christian movement that media interest in Anne really took off.

Journalistic interest was in part provoked by the fact that Church House Westminster phoned the BBC to complain about her piece, the first time it had complained about a Thought for the Day item. But from then on, Anne hasn’t been out of work as a writer and broadcaster.

She says that she hopes her move to Oxford will allow her to do more writing and less TV and radio work. But the day I arrive at her home for the interview she’s been up since 4.30am to do a piece for GMTV and is preparing to follow that up with a live appearance on the BBC’s Heaven and Earth Show.

Her broadcasting career is founded on her very decided opinions. I ask her whether she ever has doubts.

 ‘I have lots of doubts over little things, I find it really hard to make up my mind over a menu for example. But I didn’t have any difficulty when Shaun proposed either and that was a big thing, obviously!’

She was brought up in a very ‘Anglican’ family and says while she never doubted the truth of Christianity she did doubt, in her teens and twenties, ‘whether I was a Christian’.

‘The question of who Jesus was and what he claimed to be was more obvious, I have never doubted that,’ she says.

Her new book on enjoying parenting ends with a section on children’s spiritual health. Her children’s faith is, of course, tremendously important to her. I ask if she will feel she has failed as a mother if any of her children reject their faith.

She says: ‘I’d be absolutely devastated, it would be more a bereavement than a failure. I would think that I would not see them on Judgement Day. It would be terrible.’

One of her daughter’s has been ill with obsessive compulsive disorder and this illness has challenged her daughter’s faith, she admits. But Anne says she had no doubts about how her daughter should be treated, and her book is written to encourage other parents to ‘go with their instincts’, enjoy their children, and, if necessary, disregard the experts.

The book is infused with a general distrust of experts, in part because of a couple of bad experiences which are detailed, but also because Anne firmly believes that parents know best.

I ask if she has ever questioned her own parenting skills. ‘With children the bad decisions you make aren’t obvious for several years. When my daughter was really ill, it was obvious we knew what to do.’

She has spoken before about her disenchantment with the state of the Church of England, its financial problems, its divisions over homosexuality and women bishops. 

Would anything make her leave the Church of England? The answer is thoroughly Anne. ‘Certainly not. If bishop or whoever goes off the rails it does not mean the rest of us Anglicans have to shift our position,’ she says firmly.