Don't Forget We're Here Forever: a New Generation's Search for Religion
- Feb 2
- 2 min read
Reviewed by Keith Jones
Lamorna Ash (Bloomsbury Circus: 2025 )
Two friends of Lamorna Ash had formed a comedy duo. They did not seem the sort to adopt a religious style of life, so she was astonished when they decided to seek ordination in the Church of England. Her astonishment led her to reconsider the widespread view that interest in, let alone practice of, the Christian religion was inexorably waning in the United Kingdom. So she started asking people of her own and more recent generations what was going on. When she visits the Suffolk Book League we shall, on the basis of her book, be able to ask her in person. I put it like this because her exploration must be ongoing. Her newly ordained friends had clearly opened up a subject of personal as well as theoretical interest.
Her book describes her contact with all manner of Christian converts: charismatic and conservative evangelicals and members of colourful groups of people who have found, at least for a while, an alternative way of life. Many of those she met were far from the old stereotypes. She also spent time with Quakers and she visited the community on Iona. She went to Walsingham to find out about the Roman Catholic shrine there which attracts many pilgrims of all ages. And she went to St Beuno's retreat centre in North Wales to experience something of the intense Jesuit practice of silent retreat.
She found herself also with many more people for whom Christian faith had in some less expected way become central to their lives: a couple in Cornwall who had experienced a wide variety of Christian groups and churches, a convert to Catholicism and a hippy in rural Yorkshire. She records her conversations with people in a way that reminded me of George Borrow in his (much under-rated) narratives of wanderings in Spain and Wales in the 19th century, but she reveals a sensitive empathy that makes her book stand out. Through her conversations we learn a lot of first-hand information, but also Lamorna's own receptiveness to what stirs them conveys to us the effect they have on her and how she is changed by being with them. This is not a mere documentary about religion in the modern world. It's a personal journey she is sharing with us.
This is not a novel leading us through entanglements to a plotted conclusion. Neither her own life nor that of us readers is like that. What guides the people we meet here is that they follow what fascinates and motivates them, and what has surprised them in their different ways. The book ends with what she has discovered for herself: a modest, gentle attachment to a local church which will do at least for now. What kinds of Christian belief and organisation, we wonder, will emerge from the confusions of the present? Ah, that's a major question. Dead or dying it seems not to be.
Note: the paperback edition of this book will be released by Bloomsbury Publishing on 12th March 2026.
Lamorna Ash will be talking to Suffolk Book League at an event on Thursday 16th April 2026.
You can buy tickets here:
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