It started in the most earthbound, airless way. I was at my desk in a bedroom overlooking the hardscrabble surrounds of Harringay station in north London. It was early 2021, so there was nowhere else to be. All I wanted was something to write about. In my notebook were four ideas for potential essays and three of them were non-starters. The other was a piece of gossip. A comedy double act from my university days had simultaneously converted to Christianity. More: they both wanted to become priests. Comedians to Anglican priests. That was something. I sent an email, asking if I could interview them.
My interviews with the two recent converts took place over the course of a year. Do you believe in the resurrection? I asked them. In heaven? Where do you stand on demons? But what I saw of the two young men’s faith, finally, was not through their answers to my generic questions about Christianity. It was reflected in their faces and enacted in their gestures as I attended religious services beside them.
The first time I recognised this, it disturbed me: the fact that faith might so alter a person’s life they would have to leave behind all those outside its perimeters. I knew I could never let it happen to me. But by the time my essay was published [in the Guardian] in late 2022, I knew I was not finished with Christianity. I say it scared me to witness how their conversions redefined the territories of their lives. But I also found it astonishing: the way a conversion arrives like a volta in a person’s life, an act simultaneously as destructive and constructive as falling in love, because, ultimately, it is a sacramental kind of falling in love.
Perhaps it was naive not to have anticipated how spending my days alongside two fresh converts, attending services with them, speaking with them for hours about their faith, would have some cumulative effect on me. Through those encounters, it was as if the very corner of the sky had been pulled back.
I decided to seek out Christians who had taken as many distinct routes into and occasionally out of faith as possible. But I also had another question turning in the back of my mind: Could anyone be converted to a religion? If I kept putting myself in the way of Christianity, would I eventually be converted? I framed this as a joke aspect of my research at first. “Could I become a Christian in a year?” But I’m not sure how much I was ever really joking.
For my perpetual Christian road-trip – beginning in the last months of 2022 and ending in early 2024 – I purchased a 21 year-old Toyota Corollaand stocked the glove box with second-hand CDs. I filled up my calendar with Christian retreats, church visits and stays in the houses of Christian strangers all across the highways and byways of the UK – Cornwall, Sussex, Kent, Hertfordshire, Birmingham, north Wales, Norfolk, Sheffield, Halifax, Durham, the Inner Hebrides – seeking out every kind of Christian, from Catholics to Orthodox Christians: Quakers, Pentecostals, Evangelicals, high to low Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, self-professed mystics, focusing on my generation specifically, those in their 20s and 30s, the youngest set of adults in Britain.
Very quickly, I discovered the two young comedians were not outliers when it comes to my generation’s relationship to faith in Britain. Not only did I meet a host of people in their 20s and 30s who have converted to some form of Christianity, but I also detected a marked attitudinal shift in how my peers talk about religion compared with the generations that came before us.
We are leagues away from the New Atheist movement of the 1990s, which repudiated religion on supposedly intellectual grounds – though the straw-man version of religion Richard Dawkins and his ilk chose to burn down was the most pallid, simplistic form they could devise. Our feelings about faith are distinct, too, from the broad strokes of apathy or indifference towards belief that often characterised the 2000s.
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The conversations about faith I have with friends and acquaintances are characterised by increased tolerance and openness to religious frames of mind. This, I think, speaks to the kind of world in which we have come of age. We were born into a period of extended contingency, of greater diversity and plurality, in terms of beliefs and backgrounds and sexualities, of great financial instability, under austerity measures, our futures shadowed by the now unavoidable fact of planetary climate collapse. We were the first generation to have had smartphones and social media intervene into our childhoods, half of our daily interactions now carried out via fragmented chats across various platforms run by tech billionaires. Social media both makes the rest of the world more in reach and also leaves us feeling ever more atomised, craving the kind of physical community we might have once gotten through the mosque, the synagogue, the temple, the church.
The global pandemic was a silent player in many of the conversions or revolutions in belief of those I interviewed. Research into the relationship between faith and the pandemic is just now appearing. Between March 2020 and March 2021, the Church of England’s various prayer apps were accessed 8m times, a 50% increase on the previous year. During the pandemic, Google searches for prayer rose by 30% – reaching the highest numbers ever recorded across all continents.
There’s a paper that suggests that those in the UK with religious beliefs weathered the pandemic more easily than those without faith. During the lockdowns more people in the UK grew depressed, but the statistics for those who suffered depression were 29% lower among those who identified with a religion. The pandemic also offered an interlude during which many people could question whether there might be other ways to live. If not for the lockdowns, the young comedians would not have had the chance to take a pause from their careers and study Christianity. If not for all those months confined to my flat, staring at the walls, I wonder whether Christianity would have taken root in my imagination the way it has.
My initial encounters with Christianity during my travels felt transitory and unsolid. I would spend three days living with a charismatic Christian community in Hertfordshire and then return home to wonder if it had really happened. Some of those I interviewed suggested I try a couple of Christian retreats. “Take some time out from the interferences of your ordinary life,” they said. Christ needed his period in the wilderness; I needed some desert time. So I set off on three Christian retreats, the first on the Scottish island of Iona.
I was sick during the journey up there, my third round of flu in as many months. Around that time I couldn’t work out how to stay as one version of myself, my mood flipping between a depressive and manic character several times a week. A sprint followed by a crash, on loop, ad nauseam. To make matters worse, I was also heartsick. Unrequited love, the lamest of all love’s related ailments.
I remember almost nothing from the train ride to Edinburgh, nor the one from Edinburgh to Glasgow, nor the ferry to the island of Mull, just burning through tissues and squinting at field after field of sun-stung snow, the sky above very blue.
At Fionnphort waiting room, from where the ferry to Iona departs, I left a half-empty packet of cigarettes on a chair for someone else, vowing I would come back changed, in this small way at least.
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They say you go to Iona when your life is in transition. The 3 by 1.5-mile island is a holy site because it was the first point of contact between Scotland and Christianity. In 563, the Irish saint Columba rowed the religion across the seas from Ballycastle in Northern Ireland to Iona on a wicker currach, 12 men with him. The Iona Community is ecumenical, non-denominational, its several hundred members and several thousand young associates united instead by their shared values, which are consolidated in their four rules of life: daily prayer and engagement with the Bible; working for justice and peace, wholeness and reconciliation in their localities, society, and creation; supporting one another in the community through prayer and meeting; sharing in the life and organisation of the community.
The Iona Community runs retreats most of the year in the abbey.
Before the new season begins, they host a work week to prepare the abbey and its grounds for all the visitors. I had chosen the work week because it was cheaper than the other retreats, and because I liked the idea of being around for the start of something. Many of those I met come for the work week every year. Most were Christian in one form or another. Some were ordained. Lots of them were retired.
There are two worship services daily in the abbey’s medieval church. After a quiet dinner the first night, we passed in total darkness through the cloisters. We had been told to wrap up, the church being only marginally warmer than the outside, most of its masonry completed in the 13th century. Sitting close together in the choir between the nave and altar, we rubbed our gloved hands together and watched as our breath came out in streams as we read in one voice from the Iona Abbey worship book. .
High above the altar, around a great tracery window, ferns sprouted through gaps in the dark pink and grey stonework. No one knows how they got there, growing from the inside like that. The wind cried through the gaps all service long. The wild geese called overhead. There in the pews, under candlelight, I started to cry. I was so tired. I was so relieved to have made it here, to be away from my life, among strangers. Perhaps it was the simplicity of the Iona prayers, perhaps it was something about the old stone and the ancient winds passing through the church, but I cried almost every service. Could you call that faith, the letting-go of reason, a momentary burning of the heart?
After the service, we looked out through the cloisters at the innumerable plots of stars above the abbey and I cried some more. “This place gets called the Thin Place,” someone told me. Here the membrane dividing heaven from Earth, the celestial ozone, is narrower than the usual three feet, as the old Celtic saying has it.
All week I was in the gardening team. We knelt in the wet grass tugging out the weeds that had been smothering the raspberry bushes over the winter. One of the pastors working for the Iona Community told us to stop when we could in our work, to try to discover where God was in what we were doing. Now and then someone beside me would surface from their work, standing amazed as they stared over at the sea.
Tell me before all this started that some day I would gladly attend two church services daily, and I will say you are mad. On Iona I longed for our hours in the church like a hunger. 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. I’d found a language for faith that I could let in. For the first time in a long while, I noticed I was having only one thought at a time. A few days in, I was not sick any more, my mood even and content.
My last night on Iona, a pastor from Oregon asked if I would read from the pulpit during the evening service. It was the first time I’d spoken in a church service. I read with as much feeling as I could muster: this was the world now, and I wanted to be fully in it. As far as he might run, the psalmist declares, his God always remains close by him; as much as he cloaks himself in darkness, his God will see the light in him.
On the altar at the back of the church there was a polished silver St John’s Cross. And though there was no light source anywhere near it that final night, the St John’s Cross shone regardless. There was illumination when none should have been, a light made out of the darkness.
After the service, we all came out to stand in the abbey gardens where we’d spent the week pulling weeds and planting herbs. It was so dark we could make out the dusty meshwork of stars behind stars. The head gardener pointed up into the sky, directing us to the bright stars that make up Orion: Betelgeuse, Rigel, Saiph, Bellatrix. A satellite floated by, and we felt the size of the space between us and the machines orbiting our Earth. I looked up at the sky over the Thin Place. I thought about my home, the city. I wondered if it was possible to live there as if it were a sacred place, too.
Back in Oban I went to a jewellery shop and bought a cross. Cheap, silver-plated, thumbnail-sized, worn on a thin link chain, a replica of the St John’s Cross. As soon as it was mine, I wanted the cross on me, found myself ripping open the brown paper and struggling with the clasp right there out in the cold on a street overlooking a grey sea. The rest of the way home, I kept reaching to touch it at my breastplate. As we were leaving the island, we were told: “You’ll see: You’ll take part of this place on with you.” I really wanted that to be true, for a week of peace and structured living to have shaken me out of my old ways. I wanted my cross to signify this. Stand for some internal change. Proclaim it to others externally. There was so much I needed this cross to do.
Two years (and innumerable conversations and church visits with Christians from all across the religious spectrum) later, I feel so different from the person I was when I started this research. I have this courage now that did not previously exist. I still don’t think I could tell you anything definitive and absolute about the Christian faith, nor my own relationship with it – but what a trip it has been. I haven’t found any answers. I’ll go on looking.
This is an edited extract from Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion by Lamorna Ash (Bloomsbury, £22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
