How assisted dying changed my mind on religion

A couple of weeks ago, a friend voiced a sentiment that I wasn’t expecting. ‘I think your values are quite Christian, Sonia.’ What I found even more surprising was my own reaction to it. A year ago, I’d have felt patronised, maybe even a little insulted. Instead, I took it as a compliment.

Growing up the daughter of East African Asian immigrants of different faiths – my father an atheistic Gujarati Hindu, my mother a lapsed Punjabi Sikh – faith wasn’t a strong feature of my childhood. As a young child, I’d quite often go to the gurdwara with my maternal grandparents, who were religious. I went to a school with an explicitly Christian ethos. But as a teenager I saw a belief in God as akin to a belief in Father Christmas. My attitude didn’t evolve much beyond that in my 20s and 30s: how could anyone believe in something so irrational and borderline ridiculous?