Finding my religion
Patrick Galbraith asks Lamorna Ash why young people are churchgoing again
Some say it all kicked off, in a quiet sort of way, during the pandemic — but I didn’t really notice until afterwards. The hypothesis goes that in our time of great global sickness and enforced relative isolation, young people found God.
It’s no doubt more complicated than that, but when the world got back up on its feet again, it was clear something had changed. Young friends of mine — younger than me anyway — were posting on Instagram about going to Mass, and an acquaintance who had previously been in a chic lesbian relationship married a priest. Then, with predictable inevitability, London publishing houses started to sniff around for books on the subject. Boundless has Elizabeth Briggs’ Dissenters in the offing, an exploration of protestant radicalism from Quakers (who are still going strong) to Familists (who aren’t). And there’s Lamorna Ash’s much-anticipated Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A new generation’s search for religion, which is out in May with Bloomsbury.
I’ve known Lamorna for quite some time and I hugely admired her debut work of narrative non-fiction, Dark, Salt, Clear (Bloomsbury 2020), which was a fresh and wide-eyed look at what remains of the fishing community in Cornwall. Her new book is an altogether more serious and more mature work, which promises to be one of the most talked-about non-fiction titles in 2025. When I sat down with Lamorna, she told me that when she started writing about the green shoots of a ‘new generation’s search for religion’ at the start of the pandemic, it felt like she was going it alone. But just a couple of years on, she seems to be bang on trend. A recent Government study suggests that as many as 16% of 16-25 year olds now go to church once a month, compared to just 4% in 2018. Lamorna doesn’t do reductive, but she thinks that in part it’s about young people finding ‘meaning in a world that feels increasingly meaningless.’
All the best non-fiction sets out not to uncover 63 reasons why the half-baked hypothesis of the author is right – as so often seems to be the case right now – but to create a complex and nuanced picture where, like good novels, a multitude of conclusions are possible. Lamorna does this brilliantly when she writes about a young guy who goes to the doctor’s surgery to tell them that he’s hearing voices. The GP’s inevitable response is that he’s suffering from some form of psychosis, and they want to medicate him. Meanwhile, at church, they welcome him with open arms, tell him that the voices are those of the devil, and they pray for better times.
I put it to Lamorna that there’s a sense in which the church could be seen as exploiting the young guy. Are they simply offering him God in a time of vulnerability? In her gentle way (melancholy but with a sunny disposition, as she puts it herself) she told me that surely it is about whatever allows the young guy to live happily and freely in the world. Prayer might just be the salve, not mind-numbing meds with myriad side effects. I take her point.
The other fascinating evolution that Lamorna herself has been part of is young people finding radical and alternative forms of Christianity, as opposed to the Church of England evangelism that most of us in our 30s and 40s grew up with: little children gathered together in assembly, cross-legged, singing ‘Shine Jesus Shine’. Quakerism, which emerged as a dissenting form of protestantism after the Civil War, replete with naked protest, female preachers, and bursting into services, is having something of a moment. After the early noise, Quakerism (in part out of necessity following persecution) found silence — and it is in its quiet form that it seems to be gathering love. In a world where there is so much hate and so much chaos, it is hardly surprising, Lamorna thinks, that young people are seeking out the solitude of ‘the meeting house’. It was – some weeks ago – a horrific irony when the police raided the Westminster Quaker Meeting House, armed with tasers, because of their belief that the attendees, many of them Quakers, were holding a meeting about climate change and Gaza. Suddenly, faith is radical rather than fusty.
From a very new book to a very old one: I caught up with Myles Archibald recently, a veteran bible publisher at Harper Collins. Those of you who know your publishing history will know that William Collins (now an imprint) was one of the only publishers in Britain with a bible-publishing licence. William Collins himself, a West of Scotland schoolmaster, editor, publisher, and abolitionist obtained a licence from the then-monarch, King William IV, to publish the bible in 1840, which at that point was something of a licence to print money.
Bible publishing still represents a significant part of William Collins’ revenue. Myles tells me that all in all, they do about £1.5m of bible sales a year, which equates to 75,000 copies. That is no mean feat in modern publishing. By Myles’ reckoning, not only is the bible the best-selling book of all time but it’s also, in a sense, the best value book that Collins offers. Their bibles, which are over 1000 pages, start at £10.99 and go all the way up to £50. As Myles puts it: ‘at £10.99, that’s a lot of book.’ Interestingly, a great many bibles find their way to developing countries but they are not sold into those countries – charities tend to buy them here and distribute them. As publishing becomes easier and licences are no longer required, many of those charities, as well as other micro-organisations, have started publishing their own too. The internet is replete with bible oddities, from graphic novel retellings such as The Action Bible to The Bible for Men, the bible as told for fellas in 366 parts. What more could a man want?
Collins has seen a bible sales over the past year climb by 12% – which in an age when it’s generally reckoned that book-reading public is a dying breed, is pretty remarkable. Over in the States, things are looking even rosier, with Crossway – a publisher of the English Standard Version bible – reportedly seeing sales rise by 50%.
I mentioned Larkin’s great poem, ‘Churchgoing’, to Lamorna, and said it;s odd in a way because almost 70 years ago, Larkin wondered ‘when churches fall completely out of use, what [...] will we turn them into’. And yet, here we are in a time when young people, young enough to be Larkin’s great grandchildren, are finding those churches again. ‘Yes’, she replied but even Larkin, in his poem, recognised that churches are ‘serious houses’ built on ‘serious earth’ and ‘that much’ — I found he added on checking back to remind myself of the the exact words — ‘never can be obsolete.’
There is a lot of truth in Lamorna’s title, ‘Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever’. Forever in our human understanding, anyway. And for as long as we’re here, I don’t believe faith will fade; it will ebb and rise and ebb again. It will go round and round. And still to understand so much of Western art and poetry, depends on an understanding of that bestseller, £10.99 from Myles at William Collins.
Patrick Galbraith is the Editor of Boundless
He spoke to Lamorna Ash about the rise in religion’s popularity amongst young people and her forthcoming book on the Boundless Podcast. Listen on Spotify / Apple Podcasts