Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A review and some reflections

DON'T FORGET WE'RE HERE FOREVER:
A New Generation's Search for Religion
By Lamorna Ash
Bloomsbury Circus. 352 pages. £17.19.
ISBN 978 1 526 663 146

Last week, my pre-ordered copy of Lamorna Ash’s Don’t Forget we’re here forever: A new generation’s search for religion (2025) arrived, and I read it in a day.

I had enjoyed some of her previous writing, especially a thoughtful New Statesman piece with the playful-yet-earnest title "Could I become a Christian in a year?" Given the signs of some cultural openness to Christianity (not least surging Bible sales and increased church attendance), and how this openness seems particularly marked in younger people, I was eager to read her book.

Ash is animated by curiosity: she seeks to understand Christianity, putting the statistical fact of decline in churchgoing alongside the "marked attitudinal shift" of her contemporaries. Ash is a member of a generation immersed in social media, marked by the upheaval of a global pandemic, and haunted by geopolitical instability and impending climate crisis. She speaks for her peers in noting that "right now it feels impossible to ignore the question of religion". (p.18)

Ash gives us an account of an intense period of thinking, travelling and talking, visiting different groups and meeting different people. She writes beautifully, often finding rich, lyrical prose to do justice to her experiences and encounters. There are moments of deep, almost painful honesty — it is a privilege to read these. Her description of her mother’s dementia is case in point.

An exercise in compassion

At its strongest, her book is an exercise in compassion seeking to comprehend. She attends to individuals at points where vulnerability and inarticulacy combine: thinking and talking about faith, making sense of trauma and abuse, seeking meaning in the wreckage of life.

Particularly helpful, and wise, is the way in which suffering and grief are revealed as truth-bearing, even epiphanic. This speaks to a generation reeling from the aforementioned societal and cultural challenges. The idea of a God who draws near to sufferers, in and even through their suffering, is one she finds beautiful:

"I believe that the God of the religion which is my heritage might have come down to Earth as a man 2,000 years ago to walk alongside us and help us with our terrible pain because I can't think of a more beautiful story for how a god might behave. My belief is not founded on certainty, and I don't want to persuade anyone else of it. My desire for a more certain faith doesn't mean I'll ever get there." (p.291)

There’s ambivalence here: it’s beautiful, but even near the end of her book, Ash remains allergic to certainty. I warm to some of this, especially Ash’s self-awareness. And there are things I have found striking and helpful, to which I’ll return at the end. Before that, however, there are some significant flaws to note.

1. Writerly misrepresentation
   
   First, there are a few moments in which one wonders what the other person in an exchange might make of Ash’s account, and whether they’d recognise themselves in it at all. To her credit, she is aware of the possibility of writerly misrepresentation. Speaking of a young male convert to Orthodoxy, Max, whose views repulsed her, she wrote, "I reduced Max. I made him into someone I owed nothing." (p.75) Near the end of her book, she points out how one-sided the writing process is: she speaks as having wrestled with those she interviewed, but admits that the odds in those matches were always stacked in her favour. "I hold the people I interview up, even if they would rather I let go. I force their stories onto the page the way I want them to fit. They never had a say in the fight, not really". (p.295)
   
   This is helpfully honest. In many encounters, Ash shows a sympathy that is delicate, tender and infinitely forgiving — but when that sympathy fails, her judgments can be as inflexible as those she criticises (often, ironically, for inflexibility). The clearest example is Ash’s experience at Christianity Explored, helmed by evangelist Rico Tice. Her version of him is self-aggrandising, venal, as slick as he is anti-intellectual. As she herself puts it, "In Christianity Explored I often played the worst version of myself": she’s honest enough to admire the sincerity of those in her group, even recognising that their hermeneutical commitments were "a freer starting point" than her own: "I did not want to be duped. I wanted to attain some mastery over the text." (p.49)
   
   Nonetheless, I was left with a sense that she simply didn’t like these people: "I would watch many a male, middle-aged conservative evangelical pastor offer their captive audiences doses of crude certainty, expressed with the urgency of the marketplace…" (pp. 36-37) I fear they might have been reduced, too.
   
   This matters because, as Ash says when describing the impact of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry on her, "What I do not understand I have always been drawn towards" (p.186). Commendable curiosity — but it is not clear that Ash always lives up to it. Those who disagree with her own political and ethical positions don’t receive the sympathy and attention that those closer to her views do. For all her allergy to certainty in others, it’s telling when some of her responses and rebuttals (for instance, to a woman who disagreed with her on female ordination, p.181) begin with, "Surely…"
   
   
2. Frustrating hermeneutically
   
   It’s a frustration one encounters at a hermeneutical level, too: on matters of "gender-affirming surgery, abortion or alternative sexualities", Scripture can’t even give us "advice on the appropriate response" (p. 232). But when it comes to praying outside abortion clinics, the text of Matthew 6 is interpreted as speaking unequivocally against it: Ash’s reading is a dogmatic and simple indictment against all who disagree with her (p. 73). One is left with the impression that cake has been both had and eaten. The same impression follows the way spiritual masters are quoted approvingly: Dostoevsky, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Julian of Norwich and Augustine, to name a few. Engaging with them speaks to Ash’s taste and learning, but aesthetics aside, many of them are likely to be theologically nearer Tice than Ash in ways the latter should find uncomfortable.
   
   
3. Inaccurate portrayal of Gen Z?
   
   And this is perhaps my biggest disappointment with the book. While appreciably rich in thoughtful interaction with individuals, it’s hard to generalise from it to the rest of Gen Z. For one thing, Ash is only four years younger than me — perhaps already a little too old to pronounce on what faith among young people looks like. I have met enough young people, drawn to faith, who don’t mesh with Ash’s political and cultural expectations to question where she lands. The book has been marketed as a presentation of Gen Z’s search for faith. It’s truer to say it’s her search for faith — not less valuable as an individual example, but not necessarily representative.
   
   In a reflective moment, Ash describes watching a woman in a cathedral pulling at the ropes, moving with clear purpose, and not understanding what they were doing. It took Ash a little while "to relate her silent actions to the music moving through the air outside the cathedral". She describes it as "failure to locate the bell-ringer’s music within the bell-ringer’s actions" (p.260). I love that image. Mutual incomprehension, failure of communication, failure of imagination: all these make listening to those with whom we disagree, and understanding them, almost impossible. It is so precious when we succeed, and the movements and the music "fit"; what a challenge to a reader, then, to approach Ash’s work with the sympathy and scrutiny it invites and deserves.

It is so hard to stay curious, open and receptive when one feels threatened and antagonised. I am sure Ash does a better job of it than I could. But in that spirit, let me finish with some areas of insight and wisdom which I was glad to have read.

First, Ash is astute in identifying the power of tradition. While the words "strict" and "conservative" set off the wrong kind of bells for Ash, the word "traditional" doesn’t. Ash certainly seems representative in her yearning for "something hard and bright", found "not at the borders of Christianity, but right at its centre." She describes herself "surprised by a longing for rituals like hymns, for prayers or contrition and forgiveness." (p.274) I find myself likewise drawn to these things, and bemused by what older generations in churches think younger people want.

Secondly, while Ash has powerful experiences of silence in a Quaker Meeting, it’s worth reading what draws her into a church community. There is a warmth, community and even accountability in the latter which she finds both challenging and attractive. She reflects on the Sundays when she "woke with bad internal weather, feeling low, disassociative": a condition in which she wouldn’t want to go to church, although "It would be no trouble to attend a Quaker meeting feeling like that. No one would even notice." Church, with its liturgical participation, praying and singing together, meant for her: "being witnessed and acknowledged, even when I didn't want to be." (pp. 280-81)

Thirdly, at least one of Ash’s critiques of Christianity Explored hit home. She asks Tice why he focused on Mark’s Gospel; he chose it as the shortest, mentioning that his rugby peers "don't have a lot of time in terms of attention span." Ash comments, acidly, "What faith pastors sometimes have in those they wish to convert." I think I’m with her: valuing Mark for its shortness, rather than its strangeness, sells the Gospel and those looking into it short. While I know my reading of Mark’s Gospel is likelier to be closer to Tice’s than Ash’s, I certainly align with her conviction that Mark’s Gospel is an extraordinary, transcendent and powerful text, worthy of our fascination (rather than our haste).

Fourthly, and perhaps most vulnerably, Ash reflects on the surprising appeal of celibacy, and the limits of keeping one’s options open: "It's naive to imagine that each decision I make doesn't also shut down a whole host of alternatives", she writes. She had hoped "polyamory might ensure me against the possibility of a diminishing life as I got older and other people settled into nuclear families", but reflects honestly:

"When I told each new person I dated that I was also seeing a couple, it put particular limitations on what we could be together - not just limitations of time, but limits on my capacity to step towards them wholeheartedly, for them to do the same with me, when I felt and they knew my attention was half elsewhere." (pp.183-84)

This is hard-won wisdom for a generation being told to keep its options open: a whole-hearted step towards others, in love, is demanding and exclusive in ways that are life-giving rather than life-diminishing. And that is even more true in how we follow Jesus.

I’m praying for Ash what I pray for myself: to step more wholeheartedly towards Jesus, leaving behind anything that would hold her back from Him, or get in the way.