Between early 2021 and the end of 2022, an article was written about me in The Guardian. It was about my journey, working out whether I was being called to be a minister in the Church of England. It hadn’t started that way, though. Initially, the author had got in touch to ask me to connect her with some priests-in-training at the college where I was an independent student. But slowly, the sightline of the article pivoted around: to me, and my friend Josh. Our story had a more relishable juxtaposition: two aspiring comics who had weirdly come over all religious. Much better fodder for a long read.
On the day it came out, my stomach sank into the core of the earth. There I was, on the front cover of a magazine. I, a layman working at a chaplaincy, who had not yet completed the lengthy process by which you and the Church of England feel out whether you might be a good candidate for ordination (known as “discernment”). I had no right to declare myself a prospective vicar in the national press. All my careful little qualifications to the author had been sanded off for a much bolder headline.
But it wasn’t disastrous. I rang my discernment advisor in a mad panic; they told me to calm down. It could come across as a little presumptuous — but the author, Lamorna Ash, had known me for a while, and had kept in lots of warm positive stuff about my journey. Plus, this was The Guardian we were talking about, they added. The Guardian, of all newspapers, had run a reasonably sympathetic piece about someone becoming a Christian. This was a time to celebrate, not mourn. But it was my first taste of not feeling understood by a non believing writer; after months of long interviews, I was suddenly aware of a distance in how we saw things.
The church calls it “discernment” for a reason. After a year at training college in 2024, I withdrew. The spadework you do there brings up a lot of stuff, obviously — you finally have to get to grips with what you think a priest even is; what the Church is. This is the introspection you never had the time for in a busy working week, and finally doing it changed my mind profoundly — not to mention my getting married, and having a couple of children. The process did its job. I decided I was really being called to be a writer and speaker about Christian faith, which actually made a lot more sense, given where I had started.
This is a book from someone at a stage of great spiritual immaturity, with a poor grasp of the details
Lamorna, meanwhile, wrote a book — Don’t Forget, We’re Here Forever (Bloomsbury, expected May 2025). It continues from the launchpad of her interviews with me and Josh, and embarks on a quest to understand the wrestling with faith we are seeing in the new generation. She does not set out to provide a statistical projection, nor a theological thesis about what direction Christian faith should take, but simply to prove “that religion still matters enormously” (p. 20). The book is a combination of her own reflections on faith, and several interviews with atheistic Quakers, Norfolk nuns, and deconstructed charismatics, all with an aim to plumbing to the depths of how they relate to religion.
Now, it is odd to offer thoughts on something so entangled with myself. I’m in it. That’s strange. But the phenomenon it is trying to trace — a fresh grappling with Christian faith in our era — is what I’ve been living out, in real time. This book and I are estranged siblings. We are both the product of a shifting mood that is trying to pay attention to Christianity again. But we are moving on profoundly different trajectories.
Different — because Lamorna’s narrative is, sadly, a story I think we have heard about a million times. To be blunt, I’m tired of it, and I find myself at a loss to understand how such a hotly-tipped writer, with such enviable publishing patronage, and cover quotes from Rowan Williams no less, has managed to quite unashamedly say it again. This old story she tells goes something like this: humanity has moved on from “religion”, with its positive doctrinal statements about things, its absolute laws, and incontestable hierarchy. We are now on the verge of something non-doctrinaire, mystical, and egalitarian. “Conservative evangelicals” (a terrifyingly undefined block in her writing) are the classic enemy, and all about black and white certainties. But Catholics are no better. They’re nutty, sexually repressed, and into a load of old risible kitsch. Lamorna forges her way past them all with a hyper-individualised assent: God may have spoken and acted through a man called Jesus walking around 1st century Palestine. But she owes no one anything for this insight. It commits her to no club, thank you very much.
In this old story, true religion is about the unsayable. The book ends with a vision of Christian Scripture which continues to be added to, like a snowball rolling down a hill, with works of theology and spirituality whose views are mutually exclusive. That this would actually amount to nothing at all is openly conceded — that’s the mystery aspect, I guess. But it is a last ditch lip-service paid to views that Lamorna doesn’t like, which she spends the rest of the book scoffing at. In fact, for all that she lambasts the evangelicals for their moral absolutes and laws (“law” is invariably used in the book as a bad thing, as if there was nothing to be said for it), she will happily lay down a few herself: it is categorically wrong to pray publicly near an abortion clinic for example, because Christ has apparently forbidden public prayer in Matthew 6:5 — although this seems to miss that the injunction is against doing things for people’s praise, rather than praying outside per se.
To read all this is doubly discouraging, because this old story has now been dead and buried for a few seasons. I was hoping Lamorna’s book would be a representative of green shoots, for a new story about faith that is now emerging. I wanted to read something that builds on what Tom Holland, in his 2019 book Dominion, has put so sharply on the table: our basic mode of thinking, in the West, is a version of Christianity. We cannot take any of our ethical or metaphysical terms for granted — they arrived in our heads via a Christian root. We must come to understand ourselves as thinking descendents of the Christian event, and its ramifications in history.
Because she ignores this massive step function, Lamorna’s thesis is stuck in an old groove. She produces something beautifully gilded with the descriptive delicacy of contemporary poetry, and fitted with newer reference points. But if you have read any Schleiermacher, Honest to God, or Bishop Spong, you will get the gist — what is repackaged here is just old Liberal Protestantism. At times, this is barely disguised: she writes of Martin Luther, the German Reformer, as a hero who came to remove faith from “the iron hold of religious authorities and back to ordinary man” (p.10). She has fantasies about mic-dropping on some nuns by informing them that the dogmas about the Virgin Mary lack a biblical basis, and even suspects Catholics of deifying her. She even comes perilously close on a few occasions to expressing a very old and ugly caricature of ancient Jewish worship as “legalistic” and devoid of concepts like love and grace (a view so entrenched in the 19th century academy that only an event as inexpressibly horrifying as the Holocaust could turn its tide). It says everything in vindication of Dominion’s thesis that these are the habitual thoughts of someone claiming to represent a kind of openhearted searching, and not those of a Reformed polemicist.
The interviews are lovely, and showcase an empathetic writer who notices little details so well — I felt very “seen” by her observations of my ticks. And the way she draws attention to the hurt and abuse people have undergone is, of course, noble. I share her disapproval of powerplay and cruelty in the name of Christ. But I must make the point, with all the charity I can muster, that Lamorna lets slip a stupendous lack of knowledge regarding her subject matter many times — a well-informed Christian will likely find the book generates a kind of brow-furrowing-induced whiplash. This is, on the one hand, understandable — it requires really getting into the weeds to know that the Virgin Mary’s is not the only putative bodily assumption (p. 174), or that Jesuits are not a monastic order (p. 192), or that missionary activity is not the same as, and was actually many times in opposition to, imperial expansion (p. 95). Scholarly debates, where they are touched on, are entered via the most accessible and popular-level surface skims. For example: Lamorna thinks that St Paul invented the idea of Christ dying for sin (p. 164), a view which went out of fashion around the time of the electric light bulb.
In the end, a certain despair is felt that it was another outsider that got to do the “Our Generation” book. As I write this, a Durham professor who recently made a big scene of his becoming an adherent to “heretical Christianity” called Philip Goff has announced that he has a publishing deal for a book about how religion can be “reimagined” for the 21st century. But Lamorna and Goff are the outliers. Their pitches suit an old story which envisages Christianity as merely another domain to assert individual choice, and in which things like “the church” are just an afterthought; an appendage to the Ego.
But what makes Christianity increasingly compelling today is its capacity to resituate us in something bigger than ourselves. The hunger is for something which connects us to our ancestors and culture. It is a hunger for a legitimate and well-ordered body politic run on shared ethical principles. It is a hunger for a stabilising order over our own lives that doesn’t presume that our desires line up with what is best or true, and places us under authority. “Authority” — not a word that is used positively in Lamorna’s book or, I suspect, Goff’s — but nonetheless there is a false conception of “freedom” in our century that Christianity can speak to. For a freedom to do what we like really only lays bare our vices and our susceptibility — we become all the more controllable and conformable for our being free to express our every consumer preference. The closest Lamorna comes to this kind of humble submission to a bigger form is, fittingly, an assertion of her own self-determination: “I think I might need the ritual of Sunday worship to discover the courage to become the version of myself I would like to be” (p. 292).
Does this book prove the value of religion? I can’t say that it does, with all due respect to Lamorna. She offers us the same unjustified split of “false, hierarchical religion” versus “true, individualistic spirituality”. In a way, she recapitulates the same structure of thinking that she so abhors in those ghastly evangelicals with their distinction between “faith trimmers” and “full fat”. She is a true believer; her opponents are atavistic throwbacks who refuse to see where enlightenment is taking us. I commend her writing, and the clear pains she has taken to throw herself into this project. She is a sister on the journey with me. But insofar as this book puts her in a prestigious attack position, able to lob idle accusations at faithful Christians, I must be critical and say that this is a book from someone at a stage of great spiritual immaturity, with a poor grasp of the details and concepts she is writing about. It is an old story. Look elsewhere for the new one.
