Looking for answers

The religious landscape in Britain is undergoing significant transformations that remain only partially understood. Statistical data indicate a general trend of declining religiosity, which is in part driven by a disengagement from traditional religious practices and an increasing public scepticism towards religious institutions; the Church of England, for instance, has not had a good press in recent months. However, statistics can be a blunt instrument, often failing to capture the nuances of recent shifts in societal attitudes.

In Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever, Lamorna Ash offers a meticulously crafted narrative of her recent “tour of contemporary Christianity in Britain”. Through her personal experiences and reflections she illuminates the inadequacy of mere statistical measures of religious attendance to disclose the shifting complexities of contemporary belief. To understand religion, it is necessary to grasp how people perceive, enact and express their faith – how they put into words what they have discovered and the difference it has made to them. Ash is well placed to take on this project, having established herself as a perceptive observer of cultural landscapes with her first book, Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish fishing town (2020), which won the Somerset Maugham award in 2021.

Ash’s most recent journey of exploration was prompted in part by the unexpected conversion to Christianity of two university friends. As her research got under way, it quickly became evident to her that rather than being “outliers”, they represented a significant demographic of individuals in their twenties and thirties, characterized by a heightened sense of “increased tolerance and openness to religious frames of mind”. In many respects, Ash’s narrative represents an empathetic engagement with her friends’ new ways of seeing reality – a generous attempt to see the world through their eyes and share in their sense of things falling into place. It seemed a new generation was rediscovering religion for itself and recasting it in new forms.

The author pursues her quest through intelligent observation and exploratory conversation. The first part of the book describes her experiences of participating in more conservative evangelical communities – such as Christianity Explored, Soul Survivor and Youth with a Mission – as she struggled to make sense of the Bible. Her narrative here also accommodates some penetrating criticisms – for example, her comment that “the more time I spent at Christianity Explored, the more it felt like the outside world was not making it through the walls in any meaningful way”.

Ash’s narrative gains momentum and focus in the second part of the book. Here she recounts her attendance at Quaker meetings and various retreat centres, where she undertook a more personal journey through faith. The concluding and most effective of these reflections concerns St Beuno’s, a Jesuit retreat centre in North Wales where Gerard Manley Hopkins composed some of his best-known poems, among them “The Windhover” and “God’s Grandeur”. Reflecting on Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, Ash came to the realization that “faith need not take away from the life you are living, but might enlarge and make more meaningful the life you have chosen”. After St Beuno’s, it seemed that her desert period was over.

The third part of the book considers people Ash encountered whose beliefs had undergone significant change, “like Jacob’s transformation after he wrestled with the angel in Genesis”. Her reflections resonate with the psychologist Kenneth Pargament’s assertion that religious belief offers a framework enabling individuals to respond to crises of faith in two distinct ways: “coping through conservation” (integrating these events into one’s faith perspective and enriching it) and “coping through transformation” (adapting a faith perspective to these events, thereby enlarging and revising it in the light of new experiences). These accounts of a “second act” in a journey of faith had a powerful influence on Ash’s reflections on the future of British Christianity because they implied the possibility of change. They seemed “like new matches striking up in [its] darkening halls”.

These reflections on a “new generation’s search for religion” will be rewarding reading for many, and uncomfortable reading for ecclesiastical bureaucrats rushing to shut down local parish churches to fund ambitious and untested programmes of outreach. If Lamorna Ash is right, these local churches play an important role as public spaces in which people can find comfort in “times of desolation or breaking point”. They are irreplaceable.

Alister McGrath is a Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Theology and Religion at Oxford, having recently retired as Oxford’s Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion. His most recent book is Why We Believe: Finding meaning in uncertain times, 2025

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