When you belong to a community like Lewis, it’s hard to be uncertain as to your identity. I certainly grew up very aware of being placed within a genealogy, within an historical and cultural context, and with a kind of duality of experience through both my mother tongue, and the language I had to learn in order to ‘get on’.

Still, though, a few weeks ago, if you’d followed me to a reception in the Castle, you might have heard me announce myself to the name-badge distributor as ‘Norman Maciver’. She responded with, ‘riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight’, whilst politely scanning her table for the appropriate pin. Taking pity on her at last, I explained that I was, in fact, a last-minute substitute for the said gentleman, and revealed my real name.

‘I was going to say’, she laughed in some evident relief, scribbling my moniker hastily onto a makeshift label.

She was most definitely not going to say, however. After all, we live in a society which positively encourages 5’2” women called Catriona to fool themselves and others that they are 6’ farmers called Tormod, with their own quad and PSV licence.

It doesn’t sit very easily with a person like myself, of limited horizons, and who grew up plagued by questions like ‘cò leis thu?’ I would feel very daft indeed pretending to be someone other than what everybody else knows me to be.

Don’t worry, though, I am not going to wander into the morass of debate about gender reassignment. I don’t know enough about it. What I do know is that those who genuinely experience issues of this nature are in the minority. We hear a disproportionate amount about it because there is an agenda which isn’t content with educating against hatred and persecution of minorities, but which must always attempt to coerce us into approving of them too. This isn’t just the case with ‘the gender issue’, but many other modern dilemmas besides.

Far from increasing tolerance, it merely forces us to either be hypocrites, pretending to agree with unpalatable things, or it polarises society into new hate groups.

When I was a teenager and in my twenties, I knew that the churchgoing people of my acquaintance would not approve of my lifestyle. No, in fact, let’s rephrase that: I understood that they could not approve of it. It’s not that I lived like Oliver Reed – even if I’d wanted to, my father would probably have had something to say about that – but neither was I living according to God’s law. Quite apart from my social life, I had not recognised my own sin, or my need for Christ; I was living the way I saw fit, albeit largely within the staid framework of my upbringing.

I understood that there was a choice to be made. Life gives you that luxury if you are fortunate enough to live in a western democracy like ours. For a time, I chose to go my own way, and I enjoyed it.

Yet, I never once expected that the Kirk Session should be made to say that my weekends were being spent as they would advocate. Not even those Sunday mornings when I sat in church with a pounding headache from the night before would I suggest that there was anything in my conduct that they should be forced to applaud.

Besides, the right-on agenda pushers are missing the point by a mile if they think that getting conservative Christians to say ‘okay’ to same sex marriage, or abortion, or teaching kids all manner of deviancy in schools, is any sort of victory.

What kind of enlightened society attempts to make you act against your beliefs? I believe, for instance, that abortion is just a euphemistic word for ending a life. The reason I believe this is because I know that the giving and taking of life is God’s prerogative, and all that he has asked of us is that we preserve the gift once he has bestowed it. However, society will tell me that I am denying other women the right to choose what happens to their own bodies.

First, I am denying nothing, for I am just one person with one vote and the same amount of power and influence as every other ordinary UK citizen. Second, the unborn child is not a member of its mother’s body – though, in the normal way of things, it ought to be treated as such.

I could say, for the sake of a quiet life, that I’m okay with everything that the liberal lobby wants. The day is coming, indeed, when they may try to make me, with threat of jail if I don’t comply. Nonetheless, they cannot force me to believe a lie. They cannot insist that I act against my conscience. No amount of coercion can make a lie true.

Nothing I can say here will make any sense, of course, considered from a worldly perspective. To the liberals, I am just yet another deluded Bible-basher, high on hatred and champing at the bit to persecute those who disagree with me.

It is not because of hatred, however, that Christians oppose gay marriage, or immoral teaching, or abortion, or any of the myriad wrongs that someone has decided to foist on us as not merely acceptable, but somehow noble. No, it is because of love. Real love.

Human love is a beautiful and precious thing. It brings out the best in us, and elevates the day-to-day. But it is not enough. At its purest, it is still only an imitation of that original love.

God looked on what he had made and saw it was very good – and we thanked him by smashing and warping it. And we dare now to throw our definition of love in his face, as though we know best.

In his righteous anger at the ugliness of sin, he still loved us. He brought his Son into the broken world to redeem us from our own calamity – and we thanked him by spitting on that Saviour, and hanging him up to die.

And God, in the person of Christ, loved us to death. He looked on our taunting, mocking faces and he willingly gave himself up.

So now, the world is divided into two camps. We are not male and female; we are not gay and straight; we are not black and white; we are not Protestant and Catholic.

Ultimately, the world will see that there are many moral absolutes. In the end, though, only one really matters:

We are for Christ, or we are against him.