Lamorna Ash begins Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever by lying to herself. After a comedy duo she knew from university, Jack and Josh, simultaneously converted to Christianity and decided to become Anglican priests, Ash, 29, set out to understand how faith could prompt such radical change. It was a purely academic, journalistic pursuit, she writes. “I am not here to be changed.” And yet.
Ash’s previous experience of Christianity was limited to learning the words to “Shine Jesus Shine” at her Church of England primary school. Her search leads her from the silence of the Quaker meeting hall to the “otherworldiness” of the Orthodox Church. She recounts well-known Bible stories – Jacob and the Angel, Cain and Abel, Jonah and the Whale, the Tower of Babel – and her outsider’s perspective transfigures them into something new. She meets Christians of all kinds: Alex, who is bipolar and has prophetic dreams; Laurence, an atheist Quaker, who feels an affinity with the denomination’s emphasis on equality and justice; a 19-year-old with a chronic pain condition who has to believe God can heal, even as he does not heal her.
Many of Ash’s early encounters with Christianity are of conservative evangelicalism, which she finds “abrasive”. She attends Christianity Explored, a course founded by a then Anglican minister, Rico Tice. For six weeks, she spends Monday evenings at London’s All Souls, Langham Place, watching videos fronted by Tice, which she finds “lean on scripture, full of personal anecdotes, a series of moonballs, brickbats and grievances”. In discussion with the other attendees at her table, all in various stages of conversion, she “play[s] the worst version of myself: hackles raised, on alert, unable to let a conversation pass without some interjection”.
She also visits a Youth with a Mission (YWAM) campus, an organisation that trains young people to become missionaries, and is discomforted by the raw, ungovernable worship there, by the open display of emotion “so different from the composed, private faith I had seen acted out in High Anglican churches”. One night a teenager approaches her at dinner and says she has been given a word from God for Ash: “Beloved. You are beloved.” Despite herself, Ash cries.
My response to this first part of Ash’s book was recognition. I know men like Rico Tice. I, too, have wondered at the potential for manipulation in the heightened emotion of worship; at the possibility that words from God are really just words from humans. I have longed for exegesis in sermons full of tenuous analogies. I have sat in discussion groups on courses like Christianity Explored and bridled as Ash does – only I attended as a “facilitator”, one of those leading the group. I found a sort of dishonesty in these spaces, supposedly designed for exploration. They ask questions in the way a teacher who already has the answer in mind does: “That’s a good thought, but it’s not the one I’m looking for…”
I was raised in the Nineties in the New Church Movement, a non-denominational group that eschewed High Church formalities in pursuit of community and a return to the sort of early church seen in Acts. It was quite normal to me as a child that the adults around me prophesied, spoke in tongues or prayed for healing. The music was pop-rock in style, and congregants responded to it by throwing their hands into the air, or dancing with ecstasy in the aisles, or falling to the ground – we called this being “slain in the Spirit”. During prayer, they opened their hands to Heaven, signifying their openness to what the Lord wanted to do, or laid hands on each other, as though they could conduct His power through their skin.
Throughout my teens and twenties I attended a variety of churches – some non-denominational, others Anglican – but all bearing these characteristics. They taught that scripture was absolute truth, the word of God, flowing by his Spirit into the ink of men. There was little room for the possibility that the Bible was poetry, not always to be taken literally, or that the social context in which Paul lived might have influenced his verses on women or sexuality. (In their interview, Ash observes, Tice mostly quotes from the New Testament, and particularly Paul’s letters: “I think he likes where the rules are, not the unwieldy unresolvable mysteries you find in the Old Testament.”) These churches subscribed to complementarianism, the idea that men and women are equal but their gifts and purpose different. They also held that gay people should be celibate.
As a teenager, I was taught that sex outside marriage was the abuse of a holy gift from God. That sleeping with more than one person is like reusing a piece of Sellotape; eventually it loses its stickiness, becomes incapable of fulfilling its purpose. I remember a recently married woman at a talk describing how she had thrown away outfits her then boyfriend found too tempting, because we must not cause a brother to stumble. At another, the speaker traced their mental health issues to the fact that their mother had an abortion before they were born; this had somehow transmitted to them the belief that they were unsafe and unwanted. Though I privately riled against much of this culture, we cannot help but internalise the forces that surround us. Was it any wonder that, when I was sexually assaulted during my first term of university, I went to Church the next morning to ask God’s forgiveness for what I had done?
It was once the case that the problem of suffering was the greatest theological barrier to conversion: if God is all-powerful, why does He allow so much pain? Many books have wrestled with the subject, and it is one Ash touches on. But in Don’t Forget, questions of sex and sexuality dominate. Ash writes of her time at YWAM: “I had never talked about sex so much with strangers before. This vast, mysterious religion, and none of us could stop going on about our own bodies.” It is a reflection, perhaps, of our identity-politics obsessed culture, but also that, for many, sex and suffering are intimately connected.
The question is personal for Ash: at the same time she is embarking upon the Christianity Explored course, she begins dating women for the first time. She is not prepared to compromise her principles for her faith. She writes of the “denuded” Bible reading of many authority figures, who “will not find, no matter how many times they comb through it, advice on the appropriate response to gender-affirming surgery, or abortion, or alternative sexualities”.
Seeking a less caustic experience of faith, one that leaves space for reality as she perceives it, Ash takes part in three Christian retreats: on Iona, an island in the Inner Hebrides; the Catholic Holy Triduum retreat at Walsingham, north Norfolk; and at St Beuno’s, an Ignatian centre in north Wales. The liturgies and landscapes of these retreats are much better suited to Ash’s lyrical, reflective style. She has a remarkable way with simile: in her encounters with her university friends Jack and Josh, she feels “as if the very corner of the sky had been pulled back”; she meets Tom, the trans child of a preacher who, on Iona, “felt safe to let out the rage that had built like limescale through his adolescence”.
In these places, the narrative takes on a new sense of possibility. She reads from the Bible in a service for the first time, undergoes what she terms her first “religious experience”. She begins to long for Church: “The words in the prayer book felt to me like escape valves. Each verse we spoke in chorus, it was as if some new guilt or hurt was released from my body.” She could well have written, as does the psalmist in Psalm 18: “He brought me to a wide-open space.”
I was baptised three months after my 21st birthday. Before I was submerged, I stood, quaking, before the congregation and gave my testimony. I likened coming to know Jesus as my saviour to the moment as a child I put on my first pair of glasses: I could make out leaves in the trees that had always been there. It was at once a new reality and a recognition of the truth that had always been. I wonder, more than a decade later – now my faith is a half-formed thing, without clarity or certainty, at times without substance at all – where this leaves me. Do I simply need a new prescription? Or have I returned to my state of unseeing, forgetting with time that the leaves were ever there? If I was no longer a believer, had I ever been?
Ash observes that at a baptism she attends, “the testimonies had been pasteurised to conform to a predetermined master narrative: your new faith has appeared to save and better you; this transformation is irreversible… You are not permitted to find, then lose, then find again your faith throughout your life.” In its final section, Don’t Forget turns to her interviews with people who have done so: those who, having left the churches in which they first found God, are finding their own way in the “second act” of their faith. These conversations cement Ash’s sense that, contrary to her early impression that Christianity “operated as a single homogenous bloc”, there is in every church and every believer “so much moveable strangeness”. She continues to attend Quaker services, but ultimately ends up where I have: in the ordinariness of her local Anglican church.
The places and ways Ash finds God are instinctively appealing to me, in part because they demand less, require fewer extremes of self-denial, than the faith tradition in which I was raised. But also because they acknowledge that there are many shades between black and white; they leave space for wonder and doubt; they focus as much – perhaps more – on the strength of community as on the inward penance of individual sin.
Still, I struggled at times not to view Ash’s experiences of God through the lens of my upbringing. She quotes the Anglican priest David Goodhew, a leading thinker on church growth, who believes “those [churches] trimming faith to fit in with culture have tended to shrink”, and Ben Pink Dandelion, a professor of Quaker studies, who argues liberal forms of Christianity are bringing about their “own demise through diffuse belief systems… and a lack of seriousness”. The Christian I was at 21 would be horrified by the Christian I am now: she would see my faith, such as it is, as noncommittal, insipid, unserious, taking from the Bible only what suits me.
I once believed atheism was better than lazily defined half-belief. But maybe half-belief is better than nothing. This rare and arresting book raises the possibility that it might be better than anything that came before.
Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion
Lamorna Ash
Bloomsbury Circus, 352pp, £22.00
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[See also: The realism of religion]
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This article appears in the 07 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Peace Delusion