Christ Agonistes

On Lamorna Ash's 'Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion'

Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy by Caravaggio

William James would like you to imagine that you are stuck on a mountain ledge, “from which the only escape is by a terrible leap.” Now for the good news: if you have faith that you can jump across, then you will. But let yourself brood on the odds of success and “you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll in the abyss.”’ The thought experiment underlines that you must “believe what is in the line of your needs, for only by the belief is the need fulfilled.” If you succumb to pessimism about the worth or meaning of our world, then your despair may become so self-fulfilling that it even ends in suicide. But if you live in the faith that is a spiritual order beyond this realm, which justifies its evils, you will pull through.

The argument that only a religious faith in life’s meaning makes it worth living has a very specific and now dated context. James conjured up this ledge during an 1895 address to a Young Men’s Christian Association at Harvard University. Its ominous tone suggests there is nothing new about the funk currently afflicting the educated elites of Western countries. He had no sooner began his address than the light drained from his words: he knew that some Americans shared Walt Whitman’s exhilaration in the daily hustle of existence, but his attention was drawn to the army of suicides, “whose rollcall, like the famous evening drum-beat of the British army, follows the sun round the world and never terminates.” James conceded that people kill themselves for many reasons, but he was haunted by “metaphysical” suicides: people who decided on an abrupt exit from a world in which it no longer seems worthwhile to remain.

The “nightmare” weighing on these sick souls was something we have long since taken in our stride: the collapse of natural theology. Many sensitive people in James’s day suddenly found it impossible to trace God’s benevolence in the operations of the natural world. After Darwin, life was the dynamic but amoral product of evolution by natural selection, the fruit of countless accidents. James recognized that we could deal with the “speculative melancholy” these realizations induce by energetic struggle with daily evils, ignoring questions about whether they have a metaphysical explanation, still less a justification. But he reminded his godly listeners that they had something more durable: faith in an “unseen world” that waits to console us when we pass to the other side. Just the “bare assurance” of such an order helps people to survive almost anything.

To turn religion into a cosmic comforter is not to cheapen it, because James considered that any sphere of human activity can be described as a coping mechanism. He did not recognize the distinctions often made then and since between how science and religion know stuff: what drove us to formulate theorems or to cling to faith was alike the drive to thrive or at least to survive. His view of religion was as generic as it was pragmatic. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), James showed himself knowledgeable about and sympathetic towards the most ornate expressions of spiritual life. Though he hailed from the barebones Protestant world of New England and delivered the lectures that made up Varieties to a dour lecture hall of Presbyterian Scots, he refused to dismiss the fantastic austerities or miraculous visions of Counter Reformation saints as morbid symptoms. Yet when he argued specifically for the value of religion, James was happy to engage in a pretty bald reductionism: what counted was “supernaturalism,” the redemptive possibility of experiencing something (anything) beyond the material world.

We are still living in Jamesian times. His efforts to find the taproot of experience from which the tangled mass of the world’s creeds and faiths sprout have certainly fallen from favor in modern universities. Historians and philosophers of religion have faulted James for his habit of wrenching beliefs from the times and places in which they arose, urging that the precise vocabularies mystics and saints devise to speak about God (or gods) matter: they cannot be cracked open to reveal a kernel of visceral, pre-verbal yearning for the beyond. But move beyond academia and you will find that popular attempts to claim that there is or should be a revival of religion underway in the West insistently focus on its health benefits.

This was the burden of the recent bestseller Believe by the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, which recommended “mere religion” to the third of Americans who now live with no religion all. Douthat might be a devout Roman Catholic, but his book issues a “permission slip” to enter any religion that you like, by any route and for any reason. By making a decisive commitment to something, you escape the “tribalism, superstition, and despair” that are not so much social problems as the symptoms of an existential deficit. Douthat’s argument betrays a winsome faith in the algorithmic fertility of American consumerism. The important thing is not to leave the “Bookstore of all Religions” empty handed, because there will be something that speaks to you.

Lamorna Ash lacks Douthat’s American ebullience. Don’t Forget We are Here Forever, her soulful but rather mournful guide to the rediscovery of Christianity by youngish Britons, resembles Believe in exploring how religion might once more make life seem worth living. But it cleaves closer to the James of the Varieties in giving proper weight to the quiddities of religious experience, the very specific moral and emotional postures into which different creeds place us. Driven not just by curiosity but her own restlessness, Ash spends a year meeting spiritual seekers. She stays at an evangelical Protestant camp, takes retreats on Iona and at St. Beuno’s, the Jesuit community where Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote his poems, sits in on Quaker meetings and joins a series of improvised liberal Protestant gatherings. The book resembles the Victorian pursuit called sermon tasting: the trying out on Sundays of different forms of worship for a good fit, much as we might today cycle through sexual or online identities.

Ash’s people are a lively and diverse bunch but it is hard to tell how representative of their country they are or if this matters much. The book calls them “a new generation,” but they are not a cohort as sociologists would understand them, more a self-selecting sample. Like Ash herself, who had herself confirmed in the Church of England as a teenager (an important rite of passage), most grew up in Christian churches, which they rejected before either returning to it on altered terms, joining a more attractive church or devising one of their own. They are evidence for a churn within churches rather than of a revival of religion, for which there is no compelling evidence, even if some sociologists have detected a mild uptick in the number of young Britons telling surveys they believe in God.

Ash does all the same want to tell a story of generational change. Her starting point is that her friends and contemporaries — who like her are at the cusp of thirty — no longer find merely secular life adequate. She is one of the atomized: as well as a field report, the book is her conversion narrative, a millennial Apologia Pro Vita Sua. The disorientation of her crowd captures a recent vibe shift in British society. Until recently, there was a widespread sense that if theism was not demonstrably false, then it was definitely superfluous to individual fulfilment and social progress, both of which were advancing with the economic growth of the very long nineties. Grand demolitions of the Christian God by New Atheists such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins gave expression to an inchoate conviction that we flourish best when set free from Sky Fairies or Invisible Friends. When I was about Ash’s age, Secularists paid for advertisements on London buses that ran: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

Ash’s people seem to do little but worry. Climate change terrifies them. They expect little from the British state, which they see as complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide of Gazans. Their economic prospects are slim. As a freelance writer, Ash’s prospects are especially bleak, as she shuttles from one grim North London flat share to another. Even the fruits of sexual emancipation have lost their savor. When Ash starts the book, she is in a lesbian throuple while also nursing an unrequited passion for a young man. It is very unlike the home of life of Ross Douthat: but none of her erotic diversions can nerve her against dread of the future.

Some of the pieties she trials promise much more than others in remedying these dreads. Ash generally excels at the negative capability required to see what can be said for them all — but there are some exceptions. She blenches at the faintly transatlantic styles of evangelicalism in which blokey pastors bang on about the “brokenness” of their congregations and put a homophobic spin on the Bible. Christianities that demand ritual actions and utterances seem to work much better for her than strident calls to sexual purity or dogmatic rigor. There has been much discussion in recent times of the pull that stiff liturgies exert over the young: converts to Catholicism in the United States hanker for the Latin Mass that Vatican II sidelined in the late sixties. The kind of men who work on themselves by bench pressing weights or brandishing long novels in translation seem particularly drawn to difficult and antique worship. The “orthobro” who opts for Eastern Orthodoxy because its services are as profuse and gnarly as the beards they grow has become an eye-catching phenomenon throughout the West. Sure enough, Ash meets Max, a druggy drifter who has found new purpose in conversion to Orthodoxy.

Roman Catholicism exerts the strongest fascination over the book. Ash evokes well the hold of its rites even on those who ought to have disowned them. A German trans man who teaches at Cambridge devoutly goes to Mass at Our Lady of the English Martyrs even though he has no truck with Roman teaching on gender and sexuality, because its rituals somehow sustain his purpose as a teacher. In its dissonance, this person’s position makes sense to me: years ago, as a bewildered research fellow, I used to go regularly to the same lumpen Gothic edifice on the way to the station, even though I had no great faith in the God who lived there or appetite for his strict moral code. “Faire la machine,” as Blaise Pascal, the God haunted mathematician, used to say: it may be worth sticking at rites whose rationale you have temporarily forgotten.

Because the repetitious inculcation of thoughts and feelings in a faith such as Catholicism can bend what its adherents consider to be reality, we should not rush to dismiss its beliefs as unreal. Ash knows that the only way to grasp this process is to let it operate on you, at least for a time. When she goes to the Catholic shrine at Walsingham for the Triduum — the ritualized reenactment of Christ’s death and resurrection — she finds the pinched and rather childish lives of the nuns she meets rather off putting. But in living through the vigil with them and its “electric” end on the night of Easter Saturday, when the lights in the Basilica go up at the news Christ is risen, she enters keenly into their joys.

These shine brightly within the tight bounds of celibacy. The closest the nuns get to sensuous pleasure are the mounds of sugary cakes with which they celebrate the Resurrection. This would never do for Ash, who fiercely values the “distinctive pains and joys involved in each attempt at loving someone.” Although we can recognize that religious communities can generate powerful and joyous ontologies, we may feel dread at the self-mutilation required to share them. Ash does a quietly funny job of performing the reluctance that many late moderns feel about commitment. A lot of quiet comedy happens when boredom or nerves hold her back from joining in or even showing up. She enjoys the charged silence and prophetic utterances of Quaker meetings, but finds she never has anything to say herself. Hangovers overcome her good resolutions to go to church.

Ash keeps looking until she discovers a piety whose practice is safely compatible with her liberal values and romantic libertarianism. The book ends with her joining a Church of England parish in North London in which there is no stiff clericalism or pettifogging interpretation of the Bible, just friendly types who put on a celebration of the Eucharist that you are free to interpret as you like. It is a soft landing suitable for England, whose established Church is a dusty but roomy wardrobe bursting with devotional styles to try on for size. Its charms lie in its toothlessness: Parliamentary legislation passed in the long nineteenth century took away its ability to police the lives of English people but left its cultural prestige largely intact.

Ash’s conversion is not the kind that St Augustine or Martin Luther would have understood. It works no shattering change in her: instead, it is an analgesic for her dreads. Nor is her attenuated Anglicanism a cure to an anomie distinctive to these times and to generation. Instead, it allays a perennial anxiety: the terror of losing a loved one. Her churchgoing coincides with learning of her mother’s dementia. Prayer helps her deal with this not by altering reality but because it adjusts her feelings towards it. She writes finely of how praying in the Christian tradition need not mean uttering implausible propositions about a world beyond this one, but simply producing a “radical, active, and quite literal acceptance.” Whether grief is resolved by prayer or calls it forth is immaterial: the important thing is she has gained “acceptance of what is to come” and “have never felt so different to the way I do now.”

William James is nodding. His Varieties of Religious Experience memorably glosses the complex terminology of conversion as an effort to render “the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious realities.” For all the fine-grained analysis of different pieties in the book, she agrees with James in holding that what matters in religion is less what deity you believe in than the healing power of concentrating yourself on any power, being or unseen order. Such a psychologization of religion has often been attractive in the decades since the Varieties appeared, because it is a definition that is also a rehabilitation: its usefulness matters more than its truthfulness.

Yet when we highlight what religion can do for suffering persons, we often fail to convey what actually existing religions expect people to do for them. This is perhaps truest for Roman Catholicism, the discussion of which is easily reduced in the age of influencers to consumer preference: are you a Latin Mass guy? Do you flinch at hearing a guitar in church? It is true that these choices can bear social and political weight: the distaste of some recent converts, especially in the United States, for the worship of the Second Vatican Council or the folksy flourishes of the late Pope Francis can undoubtedly be a proxy for far right politics. But even these politicized Catholics treat religion as a matter of self-curation. Yet as Pope Leo lately told some French elected officials, “Christianity cannot be reduced to a simple private devotion, for it implies a way of living in society imbued with love for God and for one’s neighbour, who, in Christ, is no longer an enemy but a brother.”

Ash may be right that we live in societies that are putting immense pressure on our sense of self. Yet when we look to Christianity — or any other religion — for a therapeutic boost, we set both it and ourselves up for failure, promising ourselves no more than a Sunday off the hamster wheel pursuit of profit, personal growth or partisan victory. Yet for Leo, the “salvation Jesus obtained with his death and resurrection” is not meant to offer brief relief from our societies, but to change them: it “encompasses all the dimensions of human life, such as culture, economics and work, the family and marriage, respect for human dignity and life, health, communication, education and politics.” The teaching of Jesus “is a doctrine of salvation that aims at the good of every human being, at the building of peaceful, harmonious, prosperous and reconciled societies.” It is binding even on those who refuse it, because it is in harmony with a “natural law” of human flourishing.

These are illiberal certainties — although they should discomfit the amoral MAGA nationalists who are rooting in Catholicism’s dressing up box even more than they do secularists. The Christian religion does not recognize sovereign individuals or nations: it invokes a normative view of the human person, which is out of kilter with the conviction that we are liquid selves free to pursue our lives in unpredictable and unaccountable directions. But if we decide we cannot accept Christianity’s ontological authoritarianism, then it seems idle to pull out from its devotional riches resources with which to soothe ourselves. The more honest course might be to admit that we are all still stuck on James’s ledge — together at least, rather than alone.

Michael Ledger-Lomas is a historian of religion and writer from Vancouver, British Columbia. He is currently writing a book about Edwardians and gods.