Around 33 AD, Saul of Tarsus was a zealous young tent-maker, “breathing out threatenings and slaughter” against followers of Jesus. He watched on approvingly as Stephen, the first Christian martyr, was stoned to death in Jerusalem: the killers laid their robes at Saul’s feet. Then he made his journey to Damascus.
Near the city, a light flashed from heaven and Saul fell to the ground. A disembodied voice asked, “Saul, why persecuteth thou me?” He was blinded and could not eat or drink. After three days, the scales fell from his eyes. He was baptised a Christian.
The story of Paul (as he became once he believed) is perhaps the most famous conversion—certainly in the Bible. I don’t know what it’s like to convert; I’ve believed in God my whole life, notwithstanding several throbbing moments of doubt. Three new books discuss what it’s like to change one’s mind. They are written by, and about, people who have changed their beliefs, whether from atheism to believing in something, or from faith to believing in nothing—although believing in nothing is still, of course, to believe something.
Faith is dwindling in the west. In the 2021 census, for the first time, less than 50 per cent of adults in England and Wales described themselves as Christian. People who identify as atheists, agnostics or simply unaffiliated with any belief are called “nones”. In 2021, more than a third of British adults identified as nones, and more than half of people in their twenties. Even in America, 28 per cent of adults said last year they don’t have a religious affiliation—up from 16 per cent in 2007.
A lot of people, including atheists, are concerned at the rise of the nones. Religion, for all its many flaws, strengthens communities and provides an ethical consensus. Actively religious people tend to be happier and more civically engaged than those who aren’t, research suggests. But those are hardly reasons in themselves to take the leap towards faith.
Lamorna Ash attended a Church of England primary school, but doesn’t recall having any faith. She started thinking about God as a journalist. For the Guardian in 2022, she wrote about two standup comedians she had known at university, Jack and Josh, who had abandoned their double act and become Anglican priests. Ash interrogated the pair about their faith, feeling sceptical. “I nodded, writing down, Believes in Resurrection, in heaven, in possibility of demons, each answer serving only to broaden the distances between us,” she recalls in her new book, Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever. But when she listened back to the interview recordings, she sensed a neediness behind her own questions: could anything like this happen to me?
Ash won the Somerset Maugham award in 2021 for her first book, Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town. It was after her profile of Jack and Josh was published that she embarked on Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever, a portrait of contemporary Christianity in Britain. And it really is just Christianity (and its many sects)—Ash chose the religion because it was the culture of her childhood and is still the world’s largest faith. In the course of a year, she toured the country, meeting evangelicals, Quakers, Jesuit priests, monks, nuns, converts and deconverts and doubters. The book is a lyrical and remarkably compassionate picture of faith.
It starts with Christianity Explored Bible sessions at All Souls church in central London. The Bible readings are literalist, and many of the Christians are of the fundamentalist kind. One couple who attend together are both primary school teachers: one admits he doesn’t believe the disciple Thomas actually stuck his fingers into Jesus’s wound, post-resurrection; the other disagrees. “Now you know, folks,” laughs an American attendee. “This is what Christian couples fight about.”
Rico Tice, formerly the senior evangelical minister at All Souls, is unfortunately the sort of Christian many would imagine. He deplores what he sees as the modern culture of liberal individualism and praises gay Christians who remain celibate. In 2024, Tice left the Church of England over its decision to offer same-sex services of blessing.
Ash’s own lifestyle is worlds apart from the Christianity Explored group she attends each week as part of her book research. Her politics are avowedly progressive, and she dates both men and women—sometimes more than one at a time, as in the case of a particular curly-haired couple. “My weekends were spent dancing at grotty house parties, kissing in the backs of clubs, on night buses, waking up on Sundays having slept sub-three hours, my throat bonfire embers and my heart going at a speed I usually decided to find intriguing rather than concerning, then being picked up by the same bleary-eyed friends and lovers to drive to protests at detention centres or out on the streets,” she writes. She bemoans the fact that much of her reporting now necessarily takes place on Sunday mornings.
She openly chafes against the Christians at Christianity Explored. She is asked to write down what she would tell God if he asked why he should let her into heaven—and leaves the page blank. But, with an impressive evenhandedness, she is constantly interrogating her own reflexive hostility: “They were… required to put [Bible] verses in a chokehold, so that each line proclaimed the same thought: this is literally true, this is literally true, this is the literal truth,” she writes. “I still think that’s a freer starting point than my own: I had arrived at All Souls knowing I did not want to be duped.”
One believer offers Ash a laminated Immaculate Heart of Mary prayer card, like a rare Pokémon
For Easter, Ash visits the Holy Triduum Catholic retreat in Walsingham, north Norfolk. There, the Catholic women speak of Mary as a close friend or mother. One offers a laminated Immaculate Heart of Mary prayer card, like a rare Pokémon. “It will always work. She’s amazing,” she assures Ash. A young girl who says she has lost friends over her belief that abortion is murder announces she is joining the US Air Force. There’s no hint of irony.
Easter Saturday is a big day for the nuns. They have a party and gorge on fizzy drinks and chocolate. They even tell Ash she doesn’t technically have to go to Mass the next day. “We will, obviously, because that’s our main thing.” In one of the book’s most revealing interviews, Ash speaks to Isabella, a 30-year-old postulant, or nun-in-training. “I don’t want to miss my life,” she says. “I want to actually live it.” It’s hard to imagine a mindset where the fullest living could be this.
On a walk in the beautiful sunlit Norfolk countryside, Elizabeth, another Christian, exclaims: “How could all that not be created by a God?” Of course, Ash notes, there’s a flipside in life’s various daily atrocities. “You can find a God in everything, and everything will always look pretty godforsaken, too.”
God’s power—or willingness—to solve human problems is not always evident. At Youth With A Mission, a Christian organisation in Harpenden, missionary teacher Sam offers to pray for Ash’s recessive gum. Immediately, he asks if it’s any better. “Imagine if it had gone,” Ash drily reflects. “Imagine if I had moved my tongue over my tooth to find the cool touch of a gold filling… Would I have fallen off my chair and become a Christian?”
Sam hadn’t always believed in God; as a teenager he lived wildly, running into debt and having close calls with the police. In his bedroom, aged 21, he turned to religion. He broke down and cried. Many of Ash’s interviewees were similarly near rock bottom when they converted. Alex, a man from Christianity Explored, had been sectioned many times, hearing voices and suffering delusions and psychotic episodes, before he was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Belief helped stabilise him, and gave him a justification for the voices, which he now classifies as spiritual experiences—“some demonic, some God-sent”.
For Ash herself, that low moment came when she was sick with unrequited love. Her therapist suggested she go on antidepressants, like about 15 per cent of England’s population. Instead, she went on a retreat to the Scottish isle of Iona.
Iona is sometimes called the “Thin Place”, after a Celtic belief that the membrane dividing heaven from Earth is narrower there. In 563 AD, Saint Columba established a monastery on the island. A Benedictine nunnery, the Order of the Black Nuns, was later founded on the same site, until they were ejected during the Reformation.
Iona now houses a “new monastic” non-denominational community, where members pray, work and support each other. It is in this community’s church, reciting the simple prayers at candlelight, that Ash finds herself crying, like Alex and Sam. “Could you call that faith, the letting-go of reason, a momentary burning of the heart?”
On Iona she meets Tom, a volunteer in his early 20s who leads a service wearing dark purple Doc Martens. He is a preacher, like his father, and a trans man. As a teenager at an all-girls school, he struggled with his sexuality and gender identity, watching American Evangelical YouTube videos that promoted homophobic and transphobic content as a way of trying to “fix” himself. Now, he sees his God as a God of love. He compares transitioning to converting: “To go from believing I had to live my life within the parameters set out for me, to believing I could live my life in the way I chose,” he says. “That’s a huge leap of faith.”
On her final night on Iona, Ash reads Psalm 139 from the pulpit during the evening service. The verse reminds her of a verse from John’s Gospel she pored over in her Bible study groups: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not understood it.” What would it mean for darkness to understand light, she wonders. Would that count as belief?
Alister McGrath has spent 50 years trying to examine the light. In his youth, he was a strident atheist and a Marxist. Studying at Oxford, “I came to appreciate the intellectual merits of Christianity,” he writes in Why We Believe. Now a professor of science and religion at Oxford, as well as a Church of England priest, he argues that while we cannot prove God exists, that is not a reason to think he doesn’t. McGrath quotes Tennyson’s poem “The Ancient Sage”, about his struggles with faith and doubt: “For nothing worth proving can be disproven, / Nor yet disproven.” Charles Darwin himself did not view his theories to be incompatible with religion, he notes.
McGrath argues for “a more modest category of belief, which squares up to this disturbing human tendency to construct certainties when the evidence does not permit it.” The book, while enjoyable, reads like a textbook at times—a whistle-stop tour of the philosophical arguments for and against faith. Believing, McGrath asserts, “is not only intellectually defensible but existentially necessary”. He has written more than 50 books on this subject, including The Dawkins Delusion?, Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life and A Scientific Theology, critiques of Richard Dawkins and the New Atheist movement of the early 2000s.
Abi Millar used to agree with the New Atheists. As a young woman, she was inspired by them to advocate for rationality and empirical evidence over anything unprovable, including the existence of God. She had been raised a Christian, part of a socially conservative band of churches, where people spoke in tongues, prophesied and writhed on the floor uncontrollably (they called it being “zapped”) during regular Sunday services. Naturally, she soon began to doubt. “Religion was an unfortunate relic, and so was its wishy-washy, wind chime-wielding cousin ‘spirituality’,” she writes.
In 2018, grief-stricken after her father’s death, she returned to thinking about the existential questions and to searching for spiritual nourishment beyond what’s strictly rational. Her new book, The Spirituality Gap, reports on various spiritual practices. In her pursuit of meaning, she trains as a yoga teacher, goes to a baby rave and an atheist church, and learns about astrology, manifestation, meditation, shamanism, tarot and Reiki energy healing.
She also gamely takes part in an ayahuasca ceremony, trying the psychoactive drug that Amazon tribes have used medicinally for hundreds of years. She drinks the brew on a grimy mattress in an Amsterdam industrial estate, next to a girl loudly vomiting hers up (she was required to drink it again, as the drug hadn’t kicked in yet). Despite her surroundings, Millar senses the “warm, protective presence” of “Mother Ayahuasca”. On the second day of the ceremony, she feels herself to be in the body of a chicken, while Mother Ayahuasca scolds her for eating animal products. It works: Millar has been vegan ever since.
Millar senses the ‘warm, protective presence’ of ‘Mother Ayahuasca’
There’s a lot of ethical hand-wringing in this book. Millar chooses to work with a shaman who focuses on Celtic shamanism because her ancestors are from the UK and Ireland. She deliberates whether yoga is culturally appropriative, and whether manifesting—the belief that by focusing on a desired outcome, you can make it reality—might promote the idea that the rich simply deserve more.
That said, Millar is right to look askance at the blatant profiteering of some of her book’s subjects. “I came from a fashion background, and I knew how to create a desirable brand for a certain kind of woman,” says a Reiki healer who used to work at Kate Spade. A tarot card reader does a workshop with 60 Mastercard executives and finds them pleasantly receptive.
At the atheist church, Millar observes that this is a good way for nonreligious people to build a community. Yet, without belief, she acknowledges that she would not give up her Sundays to go. “I’m aware that ‘the spirituality gap’ has echoes of what some Christians call ‘the God-shaped hole’, a void that can only be filled with God,” she reflects.
There are many meaningful ways to fill a God-shaped hole. But to me, Christianity’s biggest appeal is the way it circumvents the need for the moral agonising that permeates Millar’s book. My favourite verses in the Bible are the moments of rock bottom: David, a killer, calling God his shepherd in his psalms while his son is rising up against him; Paul facing his saviour after gleefully witnessing a murder. The prospect of total forgiveness makes it easier to acknowledge being wrong.
Reading Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever, I found myself willing Ash to reach a similar kind of epiphany, except there’s a tension here that she herself acknowledges—it would be extremely useful, narratively speaking, for her to convert during the process of writing the book. Yet she does genuinely, tentatively, choose to believe. “I believe that the God of the religion which is my heritage might have come down to Earth as a man 2,000 years ago to walk alongside us and help us with our terrible pain because I can’t think of a more beautiful story for how a god might behave,” she writes. She would like to be more certain—who wouldn’t?—but she can only keep searching.
