Lamorna Ash’s reporting on young Christian conversions prompts personal questions

Lamorna Ash, a writer who set out to explore young people’s relationship to faith, says her reporting left her questioning her own. On a recent Sunday she was observing an hour of silence in a Quaker meeting house in North London, where an elder remarked that she had “gone Anglican.” Last May Ms.

Ash published Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever, a book about Christian conversions and a wave of curiosity about faith she noticed among people her age. Initially agnostic, she says she began attending an Anglican church toward the end of her reporting. In late 2022 she drove road trips in a pockmarked Toyota Corolla to meet young converts, staying at a missionary training school, an ancient monastery on a Scottish island and a nunnery, and writing about conversion as either an “instant apocalypse or an incremental evolution.” Her book mixes personal inquiry and reporting — at times compared in tone to St.

Augustine’s Confessions and Kerouac’s On the Road — and follows her 2020 debut, Dark, Salt, Clear. Ms. Ash notes broader trends she observed, citing that “Pew polling last year in America found that Christianity was no longer in decline, a shift driven by young people,” and describes moving between Saturday-night house parties with D.J.s and Sunday-morning church pews.

Ms.

Key Topics

Culture, Lamorna Ash, Anglican Church, Quakers, Christian Conversion, Gospel Oaks