Gen Z and God: Is the Church Answering Young People's Prayers? (Lamorna Ash)

32:09I'm so interested in this phenomenon of Christian influences. I've heard people say that, or Christians would say, the traditional media is very secular. If you want to get your message out, it's quite hard. Whereas on social media, there's suddenly a level playing field. And if you are a Christian, you can start a TikTok or you can go onto Twitter and you can reach people that way. How big was this phenomenon of Christian influences? And how, I mean, were they driving conversions that you saw? It seems to be, or it seems to be that that's the way that young people come across faith in general, first of all, now.

32:41If they're not going to a religious service with Christianity, they're not going to a church service with a parent, that might be the place that they will find it. It's people their age who look like them, who are weekly going to church and saying that their entire life is dedicated to Christ. But I, yeah, when I look at them, there's sort of, there's a kind of gentleness to some of them. And it's just like everyone doing their church fits, like the outfits they wore to church that week. or they're often in like Liverpool Street Station just going up to young people and kind of doing those like on the fly vox pops and saying, do you wish there was more to life?

33:13And everyone answers yes. And do you wish you had a personal relationship with Christ? And young people say, I mean, that would be amazing if I could get there. So it's kind of interesting. And I'm always, there's bits of it that sometimes feel manipulative to me as well of like seeking out people who are more vulnerable. And I find the certainty of it really challenging as well of like we've decided and we are the people of God and you aren't. and we have to convert you is something that maybe speaks to my sensibility that I find challenging. But I think what I've seen, I mean, the Quakers have quite a big social media following now, but it does seem to be that more charismatic, conservative forms of Christianity prosper more on social media.

33:49Is there an identity thing too? Do you think people are looking for an identity in the world and a label or something that they can say, this is who I am, this is what I believe? Do you think that's a part of the appeal? I think probably. I mean, who of us doesn't want to sometimes be able to like quickly say who we are? But I think that would maybe be an original reason. So there was, yeah, Bishop Arrheny, who is a bishop within, he's I think the Bishop of London for the Russian church outside of Russia, who did this big piece last year saying that you will not find in the Orthodox church the form of masculinity that you're looking for, that kind of we're outside of this political thing.

34:25if you come into us saying I'm looking for like this raw macho masculinity you won't find it so I think maybe what sometimes happens is that young people looking for identity and again when I think back to 19 year old me it was just all stabs in the dark in search for identity not to ever be condescending to young people but you are working out for the first time and then actually when you enter into these churches any any form of denomination probably what you're finding is more complicated than just an identity that it might be a kind of um useful to say now i can call myself a christian but then i suppose the work begins then after you've converted of how do i stay here what does it mean if i'm following the gospel how does that work in my day-to-day life as well my friend recently and and he entered christianity through um aa which i guess is like another big route into faith um because those the frameworks are christian you don't have to call the kind of higher power God, but often people do end up in that direction.

35:19And he was saying, people say, how come you're a Christian? He says, oh, I'm a Christian because I pray. And they say, isn't it meant the other way around? You pray because you're a Christian. And actually there's this sense of beyond it being an identity, it's something that you have to work at. It's a kind of daily practice in order to make yourself that person.

35:44I hope you're enjoying my conversation with Lamorna Ashe. Don't forget you can subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds so you don't miss future episodes. And make sure you've got push notifications turned on, and that way you'll get an alert whenever we publish a new episode, so you'll never miss out. Now, back to Lamorna Ashe.

36:06something that really struck me when i've written about this is that i think i've gone in with a bit of a colonist mindset and i've gone to people and said look you're a christian you must be seeking answers to the problem of modern loneliness or digital distraction or these other trends that colonists love to talk about and the kind of response that surprised me was people saying oh no, I heard Jesus speaking to me or I had a vision. And the thought that I came away with was, is there just a constant of people who are probably temperamentally more religious in any generation? And that's being expressed in a particular way now.

36:41I mean, you just think there are just always some people who are just going to have a religious temperament. And that's a lot of what we're seeing. I guess that's what William James would argue. In the varieties of religious experience he talks about this idea about six old people and happy sold people but in my head most people are probably six old but that some of us are more poorest than others to the religious experience for him it's then he always says that it's by the fruits not the roots of that experience like where does that then take you next but i think it would be i think it's and i've thought about this a lot in terms of what denomination people end up as well that so much of it is about temperament of how do you interact with the world what kind of god are you able to see or know because we're all so distinct psychologically in that way and so i'm sure that is the case that you know i met um someone i interviewed for the book alex who he is bipolar and had been sectioned multiple times and was one of many people who kind of gets lost within his experience of mental health and couldn't really be held by the nhs and he went into a church and they said oh yeah you know we have a whole kind of demonology understanding here and what you're having here is spiritual warfare within your mind and we can help you by praying.

37:48And so for someone like that, and I find it really hard because I don't have that kind of brain. And so all I can say is, or I can try and say I believe in your belief. I'm not sure if you can believe in someone else's belief or if that's a kind of contradiction in terms, but at least, yeah, I think I know enough people, particularly in times of trouble who I interviewed, who, you know, a young woman who'd never had a religious experience, although she did call herself a Christian, who she had a really difficult birth and heard God say that she'd be okay. And it must be that maybe it is, maybe a Christian would say that those are moments when you need it where the divine does come down.

38:21And maybe a psychologist would say that some of us are more temperamentally open to seeing strangeness and things that the rest of us don't have at our disposal. I mean, I really do think there's a lot in the idea that we're just people who have religious temperament. But if some of this is driven by these trends of loneliness and anxiety and digital distraction. Do you think churches are doing a good job of trying to find solutions to those things for young people? Is there a real effort of the Anglican church or the Catholic church to say, look, you're 24 years old, you have a particular set of problems in your life and we're here for those problems.

38:53Is there a church that's doing that particularly well, for instance? I don't know enough. I often get asked by priests, like what should we do to kind of get young people and keep them? And I'm like, I don't have any answers for you with that. But my sense is that by offering spaces that are free, that often have like tea and coffee afterwards, where maybe you would get to meet people of different ages, you have at the very least a kind of quiet moment where people are quite kind and generous to you when you walk in and make an effort with welcoming. That probably for a young person who's struggling, maybe who hasn't been out very much, could be a huge deal, like a huge shift for them.

39:28I think with Quaker meetings, what I hear from young people who end up at Quaker meetings, and I think a lot of, it's hard to know about retention as well, and the stats don't get that across, of is this a momentary thing? Will this last? I mean, as we know, there's not a growth in young people attending church, but there is a growth in interest, and I wonder if this will be a temporary thing or not. But young people who are moved to go to Quaker meetings, I think what they say broadly is that the quiet is beautiful. They might also turn up because the Quakers were the first denomination to call what's happening in Palestine a genocide.

39:59They were the first denomination to say that queer people could get married within a Quaker meeting. So having these outward signs that project what your political beliefs are can be really useful for a young person who might otherwise be really iffy about Christianity for good reasons. Like it's colonial past, it's LGBTQ, terrible record and sex abuse record. but I think they do struggle with retention a bit because there isn't that demand of you've got to come back and I think to me that's really important like as soon as there is a sort of pressure and weight upon a person to do it then it's not coming from them so that's challenging too but I think they do struggle with saying oh young people come and go whereas more charismatic what sometimes get called like full fat versions of Christianity that say if you convert you'll be saved and if not you will not be saved and church is a vital part of that that perhaps could be seen as manipulative i mean they think it's true so perhaps not within within that system but maybe that is a better way of holding on to people and i think the only churches that are growing um again maybe the stats are a bit confused but black majority pentecostal churches which have this like again this sort of like big connection and there's this warmth and openness and vibrancy and intensity and sticking together with your community that I'm sure is very different from a very dull Anglican church in the middle of the countryside that's sort of quiet and windy and no one really comes to and the priest doesn't talk to you.

41:23And similarly, I think the Chinese church has been growing within Britain as well and this space of like perhaps if you're living in different places, community and identity come into that in a different way. And again, maybe it's like a more welcoming space for people who might experience racism in other parts of the UK. On the subject of politics, the most visible political aspect of Christianity at the moment seems to me at least to be this sort of right wing political Christianity. And I was interested, how much did you get into that? And how much is that genuine Christianity and how much is that just a cosmetic thing that you see on social media?

41:59Yeah, I mean, I don't think I ever could ascertain or like try and determine whose Christianity is cosmetic and whose is true because it feels like it has to be kind of understood internally. Whilst I was writing the book, there were like little movements like the BNP have often used a bit of Christianity and kind of, you know, sort of go to Iona for their Christmas messages and say, this is the, you know, the root of Britishness. As the book came out, that was when Danny Kruger left the Conservatives to go to reform. And for him, you know, he'd had meetings with J.D. Vance and Christianity is kind of the centre of his politics.

42:31He wants to bring Christianity back into politics. politics, James Orr, who similarly is a very conservative Christian, who again has the kind of connections with these right wing Christian groups in America, they were suddenly coming on the ascendancy. So I hadn't really seen it before that. But it was definitely I had all my like, Christian Google alerts on whilst the book was coming out, and it was just suddenly every day. So Tommy Robinson last year converted to Christianity in prison via his pastor, Ricky Doolan. And in an article, I think it was in Prospect, Ricky Doolan had said that Tommy Robinson had first become interested in the idea of using Christianity when he'd seen the way that Christianity was used in far-right marches in Poland, but certainly suddenly using this symbolism of crusader Christianity, you know, deus volt on banners that unite the kingdom rally last year in September, which is what Pete Hegseth has tattooed on his bicep, maybe, but saying that this is a zero-sum game.

43:25It's Islam or it's Christianity. So we have to protect ourselves. And I guess it's in a way that Christianity wasn't in the new atheism period. It wasn't linked with patriotism in quite the same way. Suddenly it's this thing of, oh, if there's going to be mosques, they'll probably get rid of our churches. And I remember there was a podcast last year at the Unite the Kingdom rally. It was Helen Pidd from The Guardian. And she'd say, and which if you go to church? And none of these men who were dressed up as crusader Christians went to church at all or really had an understanding of what faith might mean.

43:56And do you think it's right to say that this more conservative kind of Christianity that you see online has a particular appeal to young men? And if so, what is it offering them? Yeah, I wonder how much this is like something the media grabs a hold of, of saying this feels like a kind of interesting countercultural trend to follow. Certainly from what I've read and do also follow some young Orthodox Christians on Instagram as well, that there is this, the way that it's articulated is that liberalism, wokeism is this kind of like terrible perversion perversion of what correct gender roles are and men don't know how they're meant to live in society anymore and their kind of rights or at least their status is being eroded and again orthodoxy is as strange a part of christianity as any other and and there's so much um kind of fascinating biblical readings within it but this sort of simplification of saying it's about tradition and it's a rejection of all that comes since and if you become an orthodox christian your wife will stay at home and you can once again feel like a man.

44:56And as these Eastern Orthodox priests have been saying, that's not what this is. And they say there's severe young men, as they call them, turn up in their churches and they have to debunk or disabuse them of some of these notions of what they think they're going to find within the Orthodox Church. And these Orthodox young men you're seeing on Instagram, these were converts, people who'd converted to Orthodox Christianity? Yeah, sometimes from other bits of Christianity. I read a piece that was about, in fact, it was a BBC radio program that was a young man who'd been Anglican. And what he was attracted to was the idea of it being the original Christianity.

45:29This is the OG form. I want truth and I want the most ancient version of it because that feels the most correct one. And so I think that might be a kind of an interesting thing or a reason for some people, an impulse for some people. And then for others, yeah, it seems to be a kind of straight conversion of I have felt lost and alone, as you were saying earlier, that we sometimes look at that, these kind of social problems that might lead people to Christianity and seeing orthodoxy as an answer to that. It struck me that when I was looking into this, I got the impression that for some young men, they were thinking everybody else has an identity label.

46:01Where's mine? And Christianity and Christian civilization was a pretty obvious one for them. And that was part of the attraction. Do you think that's part of it? Yeah, I'm sure that is. I'm sure that is. And I guess that there's a real sadness in that, that there's so much separation of groups now that people feel that they really can't. I mean, you know, this is we've been talking about this. Everyone's been talking about this for years now. But this feeling of like this growing gulf between different kinds of people and different identities. And that, yeah, if you do feel that you've ended up in one where you're stuck online.

46:33I mean, as an Orthodox priest said to me, as he's like, put down your phone and come and see that it might be for a young man who is like, yeah, where do I fit? that this is a space where you're told that you that you do fit and then to give a slightly more generous reading again this this orthodox priest I spoke to he was like what is missing from so much of contemporary society is like this kind of salvific element of saying that your your suffering has meaning and you'll be supported and if the other side of like what we talk about with young men is that you know higher suicide rates or real unhappiness like the inability to express emotions maybe that's a distinctly british problem that maybe not all men have but suddenly that there is this sense of not being able to be expressive and within faith suddenly having this space where you can talk about your suffering and have it within a greater framework of meaning and be supported by people around you and held that must be quite an extraordinary thing and you know weep in the back of a service where in so many spaces that's how you're told you can't behave as a man so we've been speaking about the appeal of christianity to conservative young men and we know from statistics that young men are more likely to be conservative than young women and young women are more left-wing.

47:43Is there a corollary to this story? Are there things that young women on the left are finding in Christianity that might find a bit of a counterpoint to that story about conservative young men and orthodoxy for instance? I think definitely. I think that one story that came to mind was I just read this book Will and Attention by Megan O 'Geeblen who's an American writer and the book's about to come out and she was brought up Christian fundamentalist and then had this kind of radical loss of faith because I think for a lot of young women who are brought up in more conservative churches where their gender roles are really particular, they're falling away from it.

48:18It can be quite dramatic in coming of age and being like, oh no, this is a place in which I will not be listened to in right-wing churches. I might not be able to, you know, I can't minister. There's a kind of crackdown on, in certain like Baptist churches that say, we never want women to be able to be priests. So maybe like a young woman coming to a kind of political consciousness about feminism would move away. But this writer, Megan O 'Geebelin, she then turned to Catholicism. And in it, she did find that something we've been talking about is this like political rootedness of this sense of putting morality at the heart of things.

48:52And for her, for a while, that really held. And then the priest that she was meeting with, who was sort of helping her towards conversion, started saying, but I think God wants you to have children. so there are suddenly these moments in like areas of the catholic church for instance where you can just completely reject it and ignore it and i know like young queer women and trans people men and women who who go to catholic churches and are able to ignore the bits that to them go against their identity and still find enough value and meaning of it to to stay i think that's quite a beautiful thing within christianity again of not needing to be somewhere where everyone agrees with you politically, that you go there for the mass, with your full identity, with who you are, and you share in that with people who might not even believe that you ought to be able to express what your identity is, or your sexuality, or your sexual orientation is.

49:43And then you can walk away from that and kind of be in spaces where you are affirmed. I think I have found that quite a lot of young women go to Quaker meetings, again, for this, because historically, again, in the Civil War period, Quaker women were allowed to speak within meetings because this idea of the inner light that is in all of us channels equally through men and through women. So I actually had this radical moment where it was a space for women to speak. And still there is that equality in those spaces. And I think, again, if women are more pole, more left wing than men, that churches that are vocal about politics are maybe a place where they'd find their homes in more easily.

50:22But then again, I think also I'm really interested in the fact that in Protestantism you talk about your politics much more. It's sort of you can really tell when you go into a church where they sit politically. And then maybe in Orthodox churches and Catholic churches, that can often be worn more quietly. And so maybe someone who has more political left-wing views still feels that they can really engage with the beauty of that and not feel that that's lost within that space and then can come out and have quite a different politics from the people around them. I'm also really interested to get you to talk about your personal journey, like where you started out with Christianity when you began looking into young people getting interested in religion and how your views in Christianity developed as you went on that journey?

51:01So when I first started interviewing people, I was so green that I would be horrified to listen back to the interviews because I just was like, I was splattering them, splattering is a weird way to put it. I was strafing them with questions just again and again and saying, you know, but do you believe in the resurrection? And they say, yes. And I say, do you believe that like Mary was a virgin and do you believe in the enunciation? They say, yes. and I just had no idea how to get inside what Christianity might mean because it felt so alien to me. And I find it really fascinating now. Like, actually, my boyfriend yesterday said, oh, my friends keep asking if you're actually a Christian.

51:35I don't know how to answer. And I was like, it's so funny because they're coming probably at it maybe where I was a few years ago where it's this opaque block of, like, behind there are Christians. I don't know what they're like, but you must be someone very different if you've ended up over there. and I think over time as I've come across so many different forms of faith that articulate themselves so differently within each person when someone says they're a Christian I want to know so many more questions but I have any understanding what that would mean and what they believe how they believe but as the book went on I had this really stupid joke version for the book which I'd actually got from Joshua Cohen I'd read that he sort of said that sometimes the silliest idea for a book kind of like tagline for yourself can be quite fun to play with and I thought can I become a Christian in a year is quite a funny tagline for myself and I was being facetious but I was also really aware that anytime you dedicate yourself wholly to research maybe there's a kind of anthropological element of this and quite honestly and earnestly as you can listen to what people think about faith it's going to start shifting your views because you're going to be coming closer to people and so I had this moment kind of midway through the research period where I was on the island of Iona in the Inhebrides.

52:48And I was going through a terrible time and my mum was just starting to get ill and I was just really struggling and deeply unhappy. And I was so struck by the service that it was like this release valve in me and I wept. And for that week in this separate place that is known as a thin place, sort of by this Celtic Christian idea of places where there's a thinner membrane between heaven and earth. And the sermons were beautiful. And I was like, oh, I can do this. I can believe in God. I can feel it. and that thing of like I'm having religious temperament I was desperately looking for strangeness and little things that would prove to me that I was in the right going in the right direction and I bought a St John's cross and then I came back to London and it all fell away really fast because I couldn't preserve the rituals and the attention to it and it felt like the whole process of the book was that kind of constant movement towards and coming back which I think a more converted or a converted Christian or just a serious Christian would say you're not you're not really there at all because there's more doubt than there is faith and someone who has a more doubt-ridden faith might say well yeah it is this constant ebb and flow and it requires practice and I really like my friend saying that line about um to I'm a Christian because I pray and I know that when I now I had this moment when the book came out where I was completely horrified by having to talk about my own experience of Christianity which is I know ironic because I was asking so many people about it whilst writing but I suddenly felt so foolish trying to explain whether I believed in the resurrection because I couldn't answer the yes or no.

54:17It felt like inappropriate language to discuss such big, confusing, complex questions that I was only just beginning to dwell with. And so I kind of renounced it for a little bit. I was like, I can't handle it. I don't want to go near. And then slowly started going back to church. And I went to a Quaker meeting a couple of weeks ago and an Anglican church a couple of weeks before that. But it's really only now and then. And I don't think that's enough to really hold to faith for the kind of person I am who's easily distracted by things. And for you, what was the thing that began to seem attractive about Christianity, having come in as basically an outsider?

54:52Oh, so much. I guess I think it really was related to it feeling outside normal life, that there was this sense of strangeness that felt like at times to me a spirituality that I could understand as God. I found prayer, whether I could fully believe in it or not, what prayer did or what the relationship was. The idea of addressing my thoughts to God, particularly when suffering, felt so valuable and so unlike any other way of operating in the world that I normally had. There was something about this space that there was the seriousness of it that I found profoundly moving. and again maybe those things when I was moved to tears in a service or was able to connect to someone afterwards because we'd been in some way opened up by trying to deal with this like greater meaning it just felt very profound in a way that whilst walking through the world and you know being in a rush and being distracted all the time I struggle with I think I'm at the moment I've been reading more Simone Vale again um and thinking about and I know and again she's massively in vogue at the moment I wonder if that's an interesting trend too of again about attention this desire of you know that unmixed attention is is a kind of approximation of prayer of looking for spaces when you don't feel like you're barely here you're barely present but instead are grounded and in the world and then your thoughts can kind of maybe mount up higher um I think that to me was really compelling I just interviewed a woman who is a photographer Susie Howell who has done this amazing photography book about spending time in a convent and she was going to visit these nuns looking for presents but looking to photograph it which I found a nice comparison of me trying to go and look for ways of kind of expressing it in words and for her the reason she went to the convent was she was like I'm always in the past or the future I'm never in the present and she went to a convent Christmas service and she just saw how at peace and present the nuns seemed to be and she's kind of been seeking for that ever since and I think you do see that sometimes when you go to these religious spaces and you look at someone you think oh you have discovered a way to live that I would really like.

56:59And I'm kind of interested to know why for you and for the people who you were talking to, it was specifically Christianity. I know that other people have said to me something similar is going on in Buddhism. You are getting converts to Islam in some universities. What was distinct about Christianity as opposed to other religions, I guess, for you and the people you're talking to? Well, yeah, I was speaking to a young Muslim guy recently about finding this more like he went to university and having had the kind of the faith of his childhood finding a more intellectual form of it or like choosing how to engage politically and like this there is this kind of shift in lots of places where young people are saying how can I not vernacularize this for myself but how can I take what I was given and told was total truth and as I come of age and again maybe see things online and kind of find these really amazing sort of ad hoc speakers about different faiths how can I take that and find something from it for me the reason I chose just to think about Christianity was because it was the only faith that had any connection to my to my childhood or to my to my ancestry and I think so much the book what I wanted to do was try and at least wrestle with Christianity and I felt I had more rights to wrestle with a faith that was kind of the faith of the biggest faith within my country even as it declines is still like the biggest faith in britain meaning that like i think i would find it way harder to i mean actually impossible to go and try and write a book about islam and say by the end of it this is what i've discovered about islam not that i ever kind of come to conclusions with my writing any really but it just it just didn't feel like the right thing to do and i thought for a moment about trying to do all the abrahamic religions but it would just take so many years those texts are so complicated all of them that's your career sorted forever each abrahamic religion There we go.

58:45No, no, I think I can't. I think it's not my job. When I was speaking to this young guy, I was like, I think you should obviously write this book about Islam and discover as many different forms of it and write something about having this space and it not just being online talking about it, but to really dwell with the text and wrestle with them and turn those into books feels like such a valuable, necessary thing. Apparently all these new religious imprints are kind of opening up in Britain to respond to this demand for faith. I really hope they're going to get lots of these books that take this wider survey and spend time with different faiths across Britain.

59:16The last question I wanted to ask you was that for people like me, who I think are basically never going to believe in God, never going to become Christians, barring some dramatic conversion experience, is there anything that we can get out of Christianity or the kinds of Christianity that you've explored that we might be able to benefit from without necessarily having to believe in God? well I was going to ask when you went to churches when you were writing a piece about it did you have how did you find that experience at what did you get out of it then I found it extremely interesting the thing that really struck me was again what I was saying that um I'd assumed this was like a cultural thing they liked the music people wanted a community the idea that people could be genuinely fervent about religious belief I've I think you're just not exposed to that particular genre of emotion like at all in a secular society and although I can't say that it like resonated with me i didn't understand there was like a sphere of human experience which i just rarely considered and didn't think about and i think some people probably did just need in a way that i don't feel like i do uh so that was strange i could kind of see that people wanted it if that makes sense yeah and i think you know you can you can track it within or like find it kind of um held within poetry of it's so much devotional poetry of the years and and to go back to the Psalms themselves about this it's so extraordinary to read of like someone struggling and like horrified with the kind of distance they feel from God and then coming closer and to go back to Hopkins of that the absolute awe and wonder he sees in everything because of God because of the God the way God moves through everything I think it's so astonishing and that I'm also really taken by when I hear people who have that kind of faith I still feel that astonishment a lot in the world that maybe now I'd have a religious framework you could call it that like these moments when you do feel like you're accessing a different version of reality.

1:01:03Often it's when you're with someone you love that suddenly something opens up, you feel this like connectivity, maybe like the way Virginia Woolf talked about, like this sort of veil behind what we're seeing, where there is this kind of like beautiful interconnectedness. I think for anyone to read the Bible is like a really great thing to do, just because it's like a fascinating text. It's the beginning of so much. I mean, I guess loads of people at the moment are probably reading the Odyssey because of the film coming out. And similarly, these texts that you suddenly realise are the origins of so much of our storytelling.

1:01:34And you don't need to have any belief at all to be amazed by the stories in Genesis and to take them for yourself and say, how can I play with that in other places? And then I suppose so many of us will come into contact with some form of religion in funerals and in marriages. Obviously, you have secular versions, but I think that's something that anyone can take value in. And it's kind of amazing that there is someone trained, hopefully well, to hold moments of intense grief well. And to say these things that these are people who are really familiar with death. And that's really valuable. And I think also just going into churches for their beauty and also for a quiet moment.

1:02:14And lighting a candle, even if you don't believe, can sometimes have this value to it of saying, I am doing something that's a ritual that is giving me the space to think about someone I'm really worried about. I think anyone can engage with and can be a fun thing too or fun things wrong but can be something that you might want to try I don't want to suddenly sound like I'm proselytizing because I don't think anyone needs to do that I don't think you're proselytizing at all that's a lovely note on which to end Lamorna Rash thanks so much for coming in and talking to us thank you for having me it's been really fun so we've just said goodbye to Lamorna a few really interesting things I think jump out to me from that conversation.

1:02:52I think the first one is the way that Christianity has changed in the way it appears in people's lives. I think probably if you're in middle age or older, you've experienced the Christian church as this institutional thing. You've grown up with it, you've gone to chapel at school, or you've been dragged to church by your parents. I think it's hard to underestimate how different it probably appears to people in their 20s, Gen Z, who are probably, I think, almost the first generation in history who are one step removed from religion. So they're not the first generation of people who become secular.

1:03:23They have secular parents. And I think to that generation, it does seem very plausible to me that Christianity, rather than seeming like this obligatory, institutional thing that you have to turn up to and is a boring, tedious part of the fabric of national life in the establishment, suddenly seems weird and alien. And I think you might almost say has some of the exoticism that you'd associate with traditionally religions that have been adopted by Western truth seekers, things like Buddhism, Hinduism, which, you know, is still going strong. And I think Christianity, as it's become less mainstream, has been able to acquire some of the appeal of those religions that have been traditionally associated with the counterculture.

1:04:06I mean, you know, to speak to Lamorna, she is not a particularly establishment person, I think, and she's kind of attests to that. the other thing that I think is fascinating in the way that young people are encountering christianity in their lives is this phenomenon of christian influences which lamorna mentioned I actually remember my girlfriend once showing me some videos of these tiktok nuns and I was just astonished that these people had so many views likes comments this wasn't some sort of dusty little corner of the internet where they were posting their videos to no response like people were interested in it and I know that certainly when I've written about this and spoken to Christians, people have said to me that something they feel is that our traditional mainstream media is quite secular and tends not to accommodate too many religious voices.

1:04:51Or if you are wanting to put forward your political views, you'll tend not to be asked about your religious views as well. Their case was that social media provides, they would say, a more level playing field where they can go and get their voices out there and they can talk. And if their ideas appeal, they're competing among a load of other voices. And whether or not you think that's a good thing, I think that is self-evidently true. I think when you look at some of the I mean really quite unusually popular Christian influencers out there on social media dancing nuns are not coming to a mainstream TV station near you and I think that's a really important change and if you're looking for that you can find it in a way that perhaps wasn't true 20 years ago and I think it's not for everyone and from our conversation I don't think it seems like we're all going to undergo mass reconversion to Christianity.

1:05:39But evidently, there is among at least some people an appetite for it. And if they want to find it, there are channels for them to find it. And Lamorna herself is a case in point. People who want this stuff are getting it. If you want to hear more about the state of Christianity in Britain today, check out Reverend Giles Fraser's recent Radio 4 series, Churchgoing. That's it for this episode. To make sure you don't miss future conversations, you can subscribe to Radical on BBC Sounds. That's it from me, but there will be another episode of Radical coming very soon. Goodbye.

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