GIVEN all that’s going on at the moment, it would be easy to miss Kemi Badenoch’s reflections on faith when speaking to Piers Morgan Uncensored. It seems that she believes that overall, the Christian faith is good and that she would fight for Christian values, but she is now an agnostic who no longer prays.

I can understand why. I believe Badenoch, the granddaughter of a Methodist minister, was raised in a Christian home where the Bible was taken literally “as the living word” of God but her crisis of belief arose from the case of Austria’s most notorious criminal Josef Fritzl and the abuse of his daughter Elisabeth. He kept her captive for 24 years in a dungeon that he built beneath his home and fathered seven children with her. Badenoch said that reading about that case had led her to question why God had answered her prayers for exam success, but not Elisabeth’s.

Put bluntly, Kemi Badenoch was raising an age-old question: ‘How can we believe in a loving all powerful God when He fails to intervene in a way that makes sense to ordinary people’’. James Dobson deals with this very common issue in his very helpful book ‘When God doesn’t make sense’.

Dobson was clearly conscious that tragic stories such as the Fritzl case can prompt the ‘Why question’ and that this often leads to a ‘profound sense of abandonment by God’. More than that, they can also generate - or reinforce - the conviction that faith is simply a delusion.

Given Kemi Badencoh’s Christian background, I would be surprised if she hadn’t been taught from an early age that believers often face difficult and painful circumstances that don’t seem to make sense at the time and I would readily agree that she has the God-given right to question why He allows things like this to happen. After all, Jesus has told us that we are called to worship Him with our minds.

As I see it, the Bible seems to show us that God is looking for the kind of faith that ‘hangs on in there’ when the storm is raging, and when we feel that we are about to sink – because it is built on the historical fact that God raised Jesus from the dead, and that He always has a good reason for doing things His way, not ours.

No one believed this more than the apostle Paul. He knew what it was to see his prayers go unanswered too, but he came to the point where he was convinced that Jesus was alive, that He was in heaven praying for him and that He would give him all the strength he needed to continue serving Him. Millions of believers are doing the same today too, all over this troubled world and often in the most testing of circumstances.