In January, a close friend messaged me: did I know a church where they could go to light a candle to mark the anniversary of their friend’s death? I was touched they had asked and surprised too – both at the request and the realisation that, yes, I did.
At midday, we met at the porch of the unshowy Victorian church off north London’s Holloway Road I now attend most Sundays (so long as my hangover is not destructive enough to glue me to my bed) and I texted its Anglican priest to let us in. It still shocks me to acknowledge I’m on texting terms with a priest – several priests, actually. After she’d lit a candle on the altar and set up two chairs before it, the church warden told us we could remain here uninterrupted for as long as we needed. Then my friend went up alone to borrow a little of the altar candle’s flame to light a votive candle and we spent the next hour watching it shudder and gutter and right itself again as currents of air passed through the empty church.
Until two years ago, when I was 27, religion didn’t really figure in my life. For the most part, I was raised secular. I say “for the most part” because, whether we are conscious of them or not, our lives in Britain remain littered with remnants of the Christian faith. I was educated at Church of England schools and so, by way of various child-friendly hymns and inventive Nativity plays, I amassed a basic understanding of the Christian story. Through funerals and weddings and Christmas Day services, I’d become familiar with the rituals that play out in Anglican churches. Still, if you’d asked me, back then I would have called myself an atheist. This remained the case until I was 26 – except for a brief flirtation with Quakerism during a period of especial misery in my early 20s.
This time around I came to Christianity at a slant. In January 2021 I heard a good story that I thought might make an interesting article: a comedy double act I’d known at university had both converted to Christianity – and now they both wanted to become priests. Back then, I knew no one who had willingly become a Christian as an adult. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would, nor what it would entail, so I emailed the double act asking if I could interview them for a piece, then spent the next year and a half following them around as their faith accelerated and they tried to work out what new demands it would place on their lives.
At first my questions got me nowhere. Do you believe in the Resurrection? I’d ask them. In heaven? “Yes,” they would answer, and yes again, each response serving only to broaden the distances between us. What I saw of their faith, finally, was not through their answers to my generic questions about Christian beliefs, it was reflected in their faces and enacted in their gestures as I attended religious services beside them. In the process, pretty much every reductive and monolithic position I’d unthinkingly held about Christianity was turned on its head.
I soon realised that interviewing two young people about their conversions was barely scratching the surface when it came to understanding my generation’s relationship with Christianity. I would have to cast my net far wider. In 2023, I set off across the country in an ancient silver Toyota Corolla to meet converts in their 20s and 30s to as many Christian denominations as I could discover, eventually to turn my research into a book.
Soon Sunday became the busiest day of my working week and I was leaving house parties and club nights and first dates early with the excuse that I had to get to a church two hours’ drive away “in, like, four hours”. Despite the noise at the moment directed towards determining Gen Z’s particular relationship with religious belief (only 13 per cent of under-25s would call themselves atheists; they are more likely to term themselves “spiritual” than their parents’ generations are), there is no one conclusive thing I can tell you about Christianity as it is lived out in contemporary Britain. I met young Catholics who were trans; radical left-wing evangelicals and evangelicals with rigidly conservative views. At its worst, Christianity (well, all religion) can be applied as a tool to perpetuate violence, divide us from one another, to make our worlds smaller and more myopic. At its best, though, it might teach people how to act more courageously, from a position of love. Take the impossible-to-square contrast at the inaugural prayer service in Washington, DC, this January: there was the form of Christianity laid out by the Bishop of Washington, Mariann Budde, with its roots in the concepts of mercy and respect for people of all identities, and the Christianity of the new president whom she was addressing, whose faith has rapidly migrated towards an especially intolerant strain of nondenominational conservative evangelicalism.
At some point over the course of the year, I realised that all this time spent in churches among new Christians was having a cumulative effect on me: Christianity no longer felt like an alien concept, but something I might want to explore in my own life. To write about young Christian converts, I had to learn how to believe in their belief. Sometimes I was frustrated by the places it seemed to be leading them. Other times I looked at the sense of peace and community their new faith afforded them and thought, “I want some of that too.”
Initially, my friends had been merely bemused by the immersive nature of my research. When I came home from a Christian retreat in the Inner Hebrides with a Celtic cross around my neck, for some of them that shifted to minor concern – a lot of my friends are queer and either grew up in churches hostile to their identities or are just naturally suspicious of Christianity, because what we hear most about it in the media tends to come from its most vociferously conservative denominations. Our capacity to engage with religion is deeply personal and contextual. I arrived at Christianity as an adult and so without any residual trauma; it has been easier for me to hold the conviction that there is no tension nor contradiction between my sexuality and engagement with the Christian faith.
And so, after my research was over, I started attending the unshowy Anglican church off the Holloway Road – a church known for its liberal, progressive spirit. The congregation is diverse (though still mostly white) and intergenerational. The notices at the end of services go on for a long time because almost everyone is involved in running the monthly community lunch or delivering food to a food bank, supporting the less mobile members of the congregation or helping to organise solidarity marches for Palestine. They all talk about the church like it’s an extension of their home, because it is.
I still couldn’t tell you how far my belief extends, only that the ritual of churchgoing seems to be helping me to live more closely to the kind of life I now realise I want – one in which I am required to be more reflective about my behaviour and actions. Obviously, I am not that much changed – I continue to be selfish, cruel and to mess up at least once a day in my personal life. Obviously, most Sundays I turn up and spend more time thinking about the steamy night I just spent with the person I’m dating than the biblical lessons I should be taking in. And, obviously, becoming religious is no guarantee of anyone living a good, moral life. From its beginnings as a fringe sect to the present day, terrible, unspeakable things have been done by those who profess to live by Christian values and ethics.
At the same time, I feel so lucky to have ended up where I am now, with a second community, a second home in my city, to which I can turn up any time I might need it or take a friend should they need it too. This is something I now believe: all churches should be open 24/7. Like hospitals, we ought to consider them a public utility, taking seriously the fact that they might become, for anyone who chances to enter them, a site of refuge, a container for grief, even just a warm place to sit out of the cold.
For a while, that day in church with my grieving friend, we sat in silence. I tried to pray (I often think of prayer as adjacent to picking up a new sport, which takes practice and persistence before you build up any skill in it). My friend considered the person they had lost. Then we talked about him together. And then we discussed other things too, entering into the sort of conversation that only seems to happen in moments like this, when, in a space designed specifically for such rituals, you are briefly allowed to speak as if life were something sacred and eminently serious. Sat next to my comfortably atheist friend in the silent church before the altar, I finally got it: why, despite my various struggles with Christianity, I’d decided to stick around.
Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever by Lamorna Ash (Bloomsbury, £22) is published on 8 May.
Cover look: leather jacket, Khaite. Knitted top, Toteme. Silk skirt, SS Daley. Leather boots, Dr Martens. Hair: Hiroshi Matsushita. Make-up: Laisum Fung. With thanks to St Luke’s West Holloway.