God seldom features in fiction. Having been dispensed with by Enlightenment philosophes around the time the first novels were emerging, he must have seemed irrelevant. The novel was new and God was old. Even clergy, who were facing an existential crisis of great literary potential, seemed infra dig to most novelists. There were new professions to explore: revolutionary, businessman, detective.

And it wasn’t enough that God was no longer necessary – neither was our need for spiritual nourishment. For the first time, and for most people, it was possible that life on Earth was better than it was in heaven.

The church remained a social setting in 19th-century novels, but the local vicars were more often comical, sometimes absurd, almost always ineffectual figures. Over the next century, if clergy appeared at all, they were mostly embodiments of the death of God. More recently, many novelists have gone back to the Gospels and appropriated aspects of the Jesus story. But rather than any serious attempt to understand his centrality to our cultural inheritance, they tend towards a kind of defrocking – mocking him as a credible spiritual leader, a trickster that finally needs exposing, his story the moment when it all went wrong.

In my new novel As a God Might Be, Proctor McCullough fears the possibility of an