Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever by Lamorna Ash review: 'both brave and infuriating'

Ash’s book is divided into three parts, although it seems appropriate there is a degree of slippage and blurring between the categories. The first is broadly essayistic, looking predominantly at manifestations of youth-oriented church, particularly YWAM (Youth With A Mission), Soul Survivor and “Christianity Explored”, a study course from the same background as the Alpha Course; though there are excursions away from the charismatic strain. The second part is not so much a pilgrimage as a picaresque (at times verging on “what I did on my ecclesiological holidays”) taking in Iona, Walsingham and St Bueno’s (the Welsh retreat associated with the priest-poet Gerald Manley Hopkins). Finally, there are case studies of people who for different reasons have left and returned to the church, with an emphasis on the survivors of conservative approaches. The memoir thread runs through, with a determining question being whether in the course of the try-before-you-buy, all-you-can-eat tasting menu, toe-in-the-water approach she is changed (or even converted). In the broadest terms, she is: whether this is permanent or not is not within the book’s purview. It is the kind of book, however, that I would expect to have additional material in paperback.

The most winning part of Ash’s book is a willingness to admit presumption. One Quaker explicitly challenges her: “Half of you is going in there thinking would this [...] be good to write about”. She graciously admits it. If you are investigating faith, being called out on your own bad faith is necessary. That candour is rather too stridently announced at the beginning where she wants to “acknowledge the unseriousness of my starting point”, and that (protesting, too loudly) she does not suffer from “any kind of spiritual deficiency”. Personally, I think a feeling of unseriousness is an ideal point of departure, the awful is-this-it-ness of the contemporary.

What does this “unsteady, discordant, overstimulated, porous-bordered generation” lack? My old college chaplain counselled that when the church hitches itself to fashion it fades with it, and Ash’s description of rave style worship seems to prove the point, although it is curious how whatever their differences in liturgy and worship, these movements all coagulate around stereotypical literalism. It is heartening to see Ash quote Jo Freeman’s essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”, and I do not think it is coincidental that many of the revival churches have fallen prey to problems associated with demagoguery – her discussion of Mike Pilavachi is both measured and frightening.

Ash writes fluently: I was taken by her description of Iona as “the hard shoulder off the highway”; although inevitably the “thin place” trope crops up – admittedly she does record the concerns some people raise about its overuse. (My personal take is not to use a phrase beloved of Ben Fogle). It is regrettable she does not go deeper into Iona’s past. Maxwell Macleod’s radio piece on the community’s founder, his father, gives an essential corrective to some of the mythification. Iona is, nevertheless, a kind of fulcrum or crucible in her thinking.

It is regrettable that so much of the book is concerned with sexuality. The Church has rightly been condemned for being obsessed with it, but Ash seems equally tunnel-visioned. Despite the caution mentioned above, it does seem as if she goes out of her way to raise it as an issue, as if not getting a reaction would be a disappointment.

Aside from her own throuple, there is a panoply of sexualities; often it is regarded as a stumbling block, a burden or a source of trauma in that people’s sexualities are condemned and even demonised. You can go blue in the face explaining the subtleties of what the Greek “arsenokoitai” means, but the visceral always seems to win. In this, the Church and its liberal detractors are co-dependent. There are plenty other sins to worry about.

My anxiety, and this may be a factor of age, is that it is, as I believe the youth say, “all about the feels”. The final parts about how her journey – an overused word – has helped when dealing with family sadness are moving, but it’s still all about the internal weather. Religion can provide the shield and the bandages, but it doesn’t exempt you from the fight, and there is little in most modern investigations into religion about service, sacrifice or bravery. It can’t explain a Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Edith Stein.

Sometimes spot-on and sometimes try-hard, this is an important and human book. The Church, as Beza said, is the anvil that has worn out many hammers; and I cleave to that more than whatever this decade’s version of “Let me be the cricket ball that Jesus hits for six” is.

Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever, by Lamorna Ash, Bloomsbury, £22