It’s 9pm on a Sunday and I’m sat in a pew in Islington’s Union Chapel, listening to the former frontman of the band Men at Work building up to a joke about his prostatectomy whose punchline involves comparing his… emissions to those of an electric car. Soon he will play “Overkill”, a song I only know from its inclusion in the TV show Scrubs. But I am being facetious. I’ll admit I had not heard of Colin Hay before M— asked if I’d attend the gig with him, but it was a very pleasant evening, not least because M—, who loves Hay a little less than he loves Mark Knopfler and a little more than he loves me, was thrilled by the whole thing.
The evening was noteworthy for me in a different way: it was only the second time this year, after my recent visit to St Paul’s, I have entered a church. I realise this is, for the majority of people, about the normal number of annual church visits, perhaps even a little higher. But for me, a lifelong churchgoer, it is statistically significant. I did not set out in January meaning for this year to be a godless one. It was, in part, practical: in moving to Walthamstow, I moved an inconvenient distance from the church I had attended for the previous six years. But it was also spiritual: if I really cared, believed, enough, I would have made the journey, or the effort to find a new local church. And it was also motivated by anger and fear. It is a cliché that faith is undone by suffering, but I cannot ignore the fact that the time I took a step back from church was also the time Dad’s leukaemia returned, bringing with it fewer treatment options and less hope.
It is curious to have been taking this journey at a time our culture seems to be doing the opposite. For most of my life, my faith – once far more fervent than it now is – was a source of shame and embarrassment; at the height of the new atheist movement, it was not just seen as naively hopeful to believe, but as anti-intellectual. There was little braver, it seemed, than answering, when a colleague asked what I’d been up to at the weekend: I went to church. My knowledge of Christianity would certainly never have been a boon at work, something I would speak about openly in meetings. But in the nearly seven years I have worked at the New Statesman, all that has turned on its head. With the rise of so-called cultural Christianity, there seems a cautious return to the idea that perhaps, maybe, there might just be something in this religion thing. I certainly feel freer to be open about my upbringing than at any other point in my life – though that might also have something to do with my increasing age and confidence.
The question now on my mind, after this churchless year, is: is this a blip, a brief experiment, a palate cleanser? Or is it my life now? Has my year “without” God in any way clarified my feelings about Him? I write without in scare quotes because it is all but impossible to completely abandon years of belief; a childhood in church has built habits and reflexes now so innate that I barely register them. In moments of extreme difficulty or uncertainty – a parent on their deathbed – and of minor peril – misplacing my keys – I still pray. Christianity, too, has shaped my character in ways I have only recently begun to consider. I expect that the admiration for resilience I wrote of last week comes in no small part from the (possibly unbiblical) Christian notion that to suffer is noble – that a person can withstand the worst the world has to offer if they have a higher purpose and power.
I think I owe it – to God, to myself, to all those years of life spent in supplication – to tentatively step back in. Perhaps this is what a mature faith really looks like: accepting that there will be both periods of fallow and fervour, sitting with both, exploring both, and still choosing to return. All I know for sure, at this point, is that the idea we are all here by design feels to me marginally less ridiculous than the idea that we are here by chance.
[Further reading: Can AI ever be cool?]
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This article appears in the 04 Dec 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Books of the Year