The UK's quiet religious revival

On Lamorna Ash's 'Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever'

A “quiet revival” in Christian practice may be underway in Britain. Church attendance, depressed by the pandemic, appears to have not just recovered but to have grown, especially among 18 to 24-year-olds. Generation Z is less atheistic than their parents, and sales of the Bible have increased. Clearly, the trends represented by and predicted to continue by Dawkins, Hitchens, et. al has given way to new movements.

British writer Lamorna Ash was not raised as a practicing Christian, but attended a Church of England primary school. She surprised her parents at fourteen by deciding one something of a whim to be confirmed, in anticipation that she might need faith someday. In early 2021, she heard that two of her friends from university, where they had been a comedy double act, had converted and were now considering becoming Anglican priests. She believed in their belief and half-jokingly asked herself if she could become Christian in a year, then went on a roving writer’s journey, from Evangelical youth festivals, baptisms, Quaker meetings, Catholic and ecumenical retreats, and visits to those faithful who practice beyond the reach of any denomination.

In her new book, Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever, her research yields varied, detailed accounts of how people search for faith, often from the middle of a crisis, and how they join, bind, fall away, and go through changes in theology and affiliation, while her keen eye registers the landscapes which nurture Christian communities, features of ecclesial architecture and iconography, and the mannerisms of the faithful as they pray, process, announce and hear the Word. Though as work of cultural anthropology it is a little diffuse, the book makes time for a personal story which brings another light to the subject, and some readers might be drawn forward by that light.

Ash starts her tour with Bible classes at Christianity Explored, an Evangelical Anglican program, at All Souls, Langham Place, in central London. Though intrigued by scripture, she is frustrated with the way these believers “put its verses in a chokehold”, particularly how they teach against same sex relationships.

The rest of Part One is primarily about the Evangelical and charismatic world, taking in the story of Alex, whose acceptance of Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior has helped him with his severe mental health problems, baptisms at a Pentecostal church in North London, and Soul Survivor, a so-called Christian Glastonbury. In a disciple training class, someone tells Ash that God wants her to know she is beloved, and this moves her. She gets to know a man named Max who is becoming an Orthodox Christian, but after disagreements over his more conservative beliefs, she does not attend his baptism, which she later regrets.

Part Two begins with Quaker meetings, sessions of mostly silent communion among people who are not all believers. Then we learn about Ash’s time at Iona, Our Lady of Walsingham, and St. Bueno’s. The Iona Community, on an island in the Inner Hebrides, is non-denominational, part of the New Monasticism community. Ash notices that returning visitors see the familiar shore from the ferry and react in blessed relief: “It’s good to be back.” As she reads Psalm 139 for the evening service in the medieval church, she sees a silver St. John’s Cross shining somehow in the dark. On her way back home, she buys a replica of the cross, to be worn around her neck.

In Norfolk at Our Lady of Walsingham’s Triduum retreat among the Catholics, Ash is feeling more skeptical, questioning claims about Mary’s virginity and the all male priesthood. She talks to Isabella, who has been in discernment there for some time, about picking a path and giving up on others. At St. Bueno’s in North Wales, where Hopkins wrote “God’s Grandeur” and “Pied Beauty”, Ash is a little daunted by the claustrophobic, arcane passageways and the non-verbal shared meals in the refectory, but she commits herself to reading Genesis and doing the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, imagining herself into the Gospels.

On the drive from there to a friend’s wedding in Norfolk, she has a spiritual experience during which “everything was dovetailing, flowing into everything else.” The visions are joyful but not, as one might expect, pastoral: “The arc of my windscreen wipers was going in time with everything around me, like we were an orchestra conducted by an invisible figure.”

Ash’s “desert period” is now over, and through a series of conversations with people whose faith has changed considerably, she begins to imagine how faith could work for her. She learns from a couple, Martin and Eve, about leaving their Pentecostal church in Portsmouth because of its political pressures, and from others who have deconstructed, beset by doubt not just about Christianity’s social teaching but also its basic metaphysical claims. She speaks with Damian, a poet, about the universe’s awareness and curiosity about itself, and with Anna, a “trauma-informed dance and movement psychotherapist”, about standing unshod in a brook in order to touch the hallowed ground, which apparently is the entire earth.

Back at the Quaker meetings, Ash is ready for what they call ministry, standing up to say a few sentences into the silence. Finally, the book’s Conclusion makes personal disclosures about the suffering that pushed her to prayer, and eventually back into the Church of England, at a parish a short bicycle ride from her home. Though happy there, she imagines a hypothetical Christianity that allows its scripture to expand “like a divine Wikipedia”, updated with Gospels according to others, accounts from the Crusades, from Christian colonists and converted natives, and mystical accounts by Julian of Norwich, Simone Weil and the rapper M.I.A. (a born-again Christian). It would make doubt and apostasy part of its story, and acknowledge more of its human and institutional problems to its own practitioners. This is an idea for Ash, not a demand, but it guides a lot of thinking: she had her second thoughts about missing Max’s Orthodox baptism when listening to the recordings of their conversation and noticing that “his positions all sounded so much less stable than I had remembered.”

Noting Ash’s penchant for indeterminacy, readers will sense early that this book is not going to give a simple answer as to why young British people are returning to church. It does not deal at length with the survey data, nor does Ash consistently ask her converting subjects for their reasons. As she concedes early, hers was a haphazard process in which anytime her friends mentioned that someone they knew was a Christian of some sort (which can be a rare thing in college educated circles) she sought a conversation. This and her general interest in the heterodox has somewhat skewed things towards the distinctive non-denominational characters, those who believe they have special insights about the relationship between doubt and faith, or ways of marrying Christianity with classical myths. But Ash is still able to describe Christian churches at work in the way one hopes for, finding people here and moving them there, if not all the way to orthodoxy. Her subject Tim, now a congregant at One Church, happened upon Norwich’s Anglican cathedral, picked up a copy of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love at the shop, and was drawn from vague spirituality into a Christian account of God’s revelation.

Tim’s story is of the solitary and mystical sort, and while every conversion probably involves intimations if not ecstatic visions, the trends of the last few years presumably involve some more general and social factors. Ash’s story itself, in which the post-New Atheist millennial encounter with Christianity is startling, unsettling, and eventually transformative, is surely suggestive. People will look for structure and routine, of course, but also for the belief in transcendence that gives their moral intuitions the right context.

Ever concerned with social issues, Ash sees Christianity in no small part as a guide for our responses to them. Recalling the broken vigil at Gethsemane, that terrible failure of the disciples, she considers it a reminder of how difficult it is to stay alert to injustices. Efforts at political change will clearly be, for her, an essential way to live the Gospel. Bad news calls for evangelion, good news, and then for a Christian response. Climate change, the conditions for refugees, and financial precarity are “horror after horror on loop”, a series of tragedies for which she and others will need faith, for support, of course, but also so as not to be “insulated”.

But a newfound faith is not primarily about reminding one of what one already believed. Thus far, it could be said that some of Ash’s secular convictions seem rather well “insulated” from Christian teaching. Addressing the Catholic Church vis-à-vis gender identity, she maintains that “the less our institutions acknowledge and permit each person’s unique and infinite dignity, the more followers they will lose as this century goes on.”

Frankly, it is the denominations which are less progressive on such matters, Catholic and Pentecostal, that are gaining in attendance among the young. And though Ash may not have had this issue in mind, it is they who are more inclined to extend that concern for the human person’s infinite dignity from the very beginning of natural life to the very end. Defined as it is for her by instability, Ash’s faith may undergo and prompt changes in future, and if there are other converts and reverts like her, so will it be for them. For now, it is an enlivening example of renewal through a kind of return.

“My belief is not founded on certainty, and I don’t want to persuade anyone else of it,” Ash writes. But any impassioned young person who feels that all lives are somehow valuable (and sees them treated as if they are not), will wonder at human origins and destinations, and this account of Ash’s path all over her country and eventually back to her local parish will testify for their benefit that there is someone to seek for answers and instructions, and that He is ready when they are.