Is Christianity Becoming Countercultural Again? (Your Radical Questions with Lamorna Ash)

**James Marriott** (0:08)
Hello, I'm James Marriott and welcome to Your Radical Questions, where we put your questions to one of our guests. This is your chance to engage directly with the radical people we have on this podcast and to ask them about their ideas for the future.
Lamorna Ash joins me again. She travelled around Britain meeting young Christians across the religious and political spectrum, exploring what faith might offer a generation facing the unique problems of the modern world. What began as research for her book also became a personal journey, leaving her increasingly open to Christianity.
If you haven't heard our last episode where we talk about all of that in detail, then I'd recommend going back to listen.
But today I'll be putting your questions to Lamorna Ash. Lamorna, thanks for being with us.

**Lamorna Ash** (0:55)
Hello.

**James Marriott** (0:57)
How are you doing?

**Lamorna Ash** (0:58)
I'm really well. How are you doing?

**James Marriott** (0:59)
Good, and it's good to have you back for the questions. Our first one is from Jess, who is asking about religion among younger people and in public life. She's 35 and says that young Christians seem to be tending towards evangelical American style churches, high church Anglicanism and Catholicism. She's a Catholic herself. She says, having grown up in an age of materialist superficiality of smug dogmatic atheism that sneers at the primitive instincts and beliefs of religious people, and having been told your whole life that the pursuit of success and fun was the sum total of life's meaning, many of us have been left spiritually bereft. You'll also likely know that many people, especially women my age and younger, are getting into tarot and astrology.
My own conversion journey was escalated by experiences I had during yoga of all things. What's clear is that many of us have been yearning to find an underlying cosmic purpose to the world and our place in it.
Why are some people under 40 finding religion in churches that feel older, more ritualistic or more ecstatic? And why has Christian faith in particular been sidelined as a legitimate viewpoint?

**Lamorna Ash** (2:08)
Well, there's so much in there.
Okay, so one thing that I think is to always both think cultural moment and then also universal things. And I don't know about you, James, but there's something about getting older where I wonder if this just happens at every single generation that you get to your thirties and you start looking for deeper meanings because more things are happening to you. Your early twenties, you're working it all out. You're trying to understand or you're trying to understand things. But you're also really in the way of yourself, I think, in some ways. And then suddenly you're like, oh, what am I doing here? And what is this like beautiful love doing to me? And how do I deal with this grief that's happening? So I do wonder if I could have all generations have this moment of coming of age that is later maybe for our generation because we do a lot of things later. You move out later, you get married later. And so I wonder if this always does happen, that people suddenly do start becoming more tuned to spiritual as they hit their early 30s.

**James Marriott** (3:00)
And what do you make in particular of her feeling that it's older and more ritualistic churches that are appealing to young people?

**Lamorna Ash** (3:07)
I think I can understand.
I'm not sure how wholly true it is because there's some people who are really taken by these mega churches and these spaces that often are in modern buildings or estate churches, churches that little churches on an estate or are in a cinema half the time. But I can understand, again, I think it speaks to something we spoke about a lot in the last episode of people looking for places that have a kind of rootedness. And there is that line from, it's just because it's a great poem, but Philip Larkin's Church is going about a serious house built on serious ground. The sense of buildings that's because of their relationship to time and all these people have traveled through them, have this depth of meaning that people can feel and therefore want to go there. And then in terms of things that have rituals, I suppose, again, if there's this kind of anemic quality to much and not all, but much of contemporary society, I sometimes think about it when I'm going through Tesco's and there's not a single person to speak to and these flat screens with like whatever moving images on. Sounds like I'm an alien.

**James Marriott** (4:15)