It would be interesting to see a study of the response of the baptised versus the unbaptised . . .

perhaps a control group of those people we were brought up to call pagans . . . to those moments in life when a person has to make a profound decision about behaviour. These, it seems to me, are the moments that are most 'a worry to parents'.

No matter how carefully and lovingly you try to nurture children, in the end they have to go out into life on their own and make decisions themselves about who they are and what they believe and what path they want to choose.

Does it make any difference at those moments whether they have fulfilled the requirements for membership of this church or that? I shouldn't think so. Does it make a difference if the home they come from has been a religious one? Well . . . it must.

But what kind of difference? The present Bush administration in the United States is highly ideological . . . it would say, religious . . . and one of the areas in which it promotes its belief is sex education. Because of arguments best known to rightwing Christians and oppressors of women the world over, the Bush administration does not believe that contraception is approved of by God (I don't know how the Bushes and many of their peers manage it but he is one of two children, he has two, his brother has two, etc).

We will leave aside the number of people the policy derived from this belief has killed in parts of the world less favoured than the United States, through denying funds to Aids relief programmes that promote the use of condoms.

In the United States the Bush administration has been spending about $176m annually on a federal programme which funds . . .

exclusively . . . sex education that teaches abstinence only, ie that teaches the benefits of abstaining from sexual activity, until, I presume, after marriage. And presumably it is a key attraction of abstinence that there are benefits for all eternity, too, otherwise these programmes would not so often be administered by 'religious' people. In the short term, of course, the programmes increase the amount of dissension on planet earth, since they condemn homosexuality, masturbation, abortion and contraception. However, George Bush requested $204m for abstinence-only funding in his 2007 budget.

Most parents, in my opinion . . . their own tangled pasts and the fact that they somehow muddled through them forgotten . . . would like nothing more than that their children would abstain. I myself wish children would abstain from sex . . . I mean children, not young people.

But the first serious, sustained analysis of the efficacy of abstinence programmes . . .

commissioned by Congress and costing $7m . . . reports that the kids inducted into abstinence have the same number of sexual partners, overall, as kids who were not exposed to the abstinence experience. And they had their first sexual experience at the same age as other kids. And that age, I very much regret to say, in the United States, is 14.9 years.

That's too young. I don't see how people of that age can know themselves and the world well enough not to hurt themselves and others very badly playing with something as powerful as sex.

But how do you stop the play? Well, consider the Roman Catholic Church. The authorities deployed really heavy threats and deprivations to ensure that the greatest possible number of people were baptised into Christianity. But have threat and sanction been effective? No.

In the first world, Christianity has been in decline for a long time.

Parents, too, find that sanctions don't work.

If you lock the kids in to stop them going to the disco they burrow their way through the walls.

But behind the Limbo threats stood the Great Idea of God's love . . . the idea that the Creator perfectly knows you and perfectly loves you. This pearl beyond price is what would be lost to those who disobey. Parents can't do and wouldn't do what churchmen blithely taught that God does . . . they can't, as punishment, deny their children their love. But maybe, somehow, there's a way of bringing children through the hardest passages by love . . . by loving them more, not less. By knowing them better and being gladdened by them and taking trouble for them and placing their wellbeing before the parents' own.

I don't know. I have no experience with children. I only know that the Limbo thing was an example of sticks-and-carrots manipulation which can be applied to other circumstances.

And that when it comes to getting people to obey, sanctions don't work and love or the hope of love is the great motive. And, of course, that though you mightn't think it when they're pacing the floor waiting for their child to come home looking flushed and guilty, human parents, baptised or unbaptised, are capable of heroic love.