My father was born in 1913 in a Christian country. The village school he attended began each day with Bible study and made no apology for regarding other religions as mistakes which Scotland's missionaries, supported by the school's collecting box, would soon correct. Most Scots were Presbyterian Protestants. Though Catholics were a substantial presence in the industrial lowlands, the national Church of Scotland still claimed to represent the Scottish people. The country into which my son was born in 1994 was a very different place. It still had the national Kirk but churchgoers were a minority and as likely to be Catholic as Presbyterian. My father was delivered at home by the local midwife: a bastion of the parish church. My son was delivered in Aberdeen's maternity hospital by a Bahraini Muslim; just one of the many immigrants who have added new colours to Scotland's religious complexion.

Stereotypes outlive their realities as much as they exaggerate them. The image of ‘Scotland as a land where people and church are in unique alliance’ remained current long after that alliance had collapsed. At the end of the twentieth century, the Queen's summer holiday attendances at Crathie Kirk were still reported on the evening news, the popular magazine the People's Friend as often as not featured a rural church on its front cover, and every profile of the Labour government's chancellor Gordon Brown mentioned that he was ‘a son of the manse’.