Don't Forget We're Here Forever

• 27 June 2025
• books

Many years ago I remember Tom commenting, in response to an article about a resurgence in Catholicism among young people, that it reminded him of a book he read about Riot Grrl. What had become clear to him reading that book (he said) is that Riot Grrl wasn’t really a movement as much as it was "a few bands with some good songs, a small local scene, and a couple of zines and aborted meetups". Similarly, the article about the resurgence of Catholicism was very obviously about a few people who were very noisy on Twitter. This worried me slightly going into this book, because it was described as the Lamorna Ash, the author, "investigat[ing] what is driving Gen Z today to embrace Christianity".

Don't Forget, We're Here Forever (and yes, it is a Simpsons reference^[1]), thankfully dodges this problem fairly effectively by taking a somewhat more anthropological view (rather than attempting to draw conclusions about broader trends) and being about the author’s own journey into belief^[2]. It's also a book, which means that unlike those articles it can spread its focus across a broader swathe of possible Christianities.

It immediately endeared itself to me by spending a lot of time, initially at least, exploring the (for better or worse) actually popular growth area for mainstream UK Christianity, evangelicalism. This isn't the most aesthetically interesting bit of the church—it's not generally the bit that gets the articles written about it^[3]—but I can't deny it's the the bit that most effectively gets people in the doors at the moment. She goes to a Christianity Explored course, she goes to visit YWAM. These things will likely not mean much to most of my readers but I grew up in that kind of church and didn't have much cause to question it until my later teens. It's honestly quite vindicating to see it being encountered by someone who's probably a lot closer to where I am now and who pretty quickly takes against it.

She goes on to spend a lot of time with people like me: people who grew up in that tradition, still have love for the people we knew from it and the sort of residual affection that can come from having spent a lot of time in a particular context—but who have found themselves moved in other directions. She even goes to ONE Church, just down the road from me—the church I would probably go to if I weren't terminally hymnpilled and hadn't been drawn in a more liturgical direction. I got a big laugh from the end of that chapter:

On the train home I called my dad to say I was thinking of moving to Brighton. He said, ‘I’ve heard that one before.’

It is also, I feel, a book about leaving your 20s (as a certain kind of person). I had a chat with a friend the other week where we agreed that, while we don’t want to die, were we to die now we wouldn’t feel like we were missing out or like we were leaving a lot on the table. Hitting your 30s means that you’ve been a few different versions of yourself as an adult. Most things are no longer happening to you for the first time, you've seen things come and go a bit now. If you're lucky, you've done a lot of cool and interesting things and found a bit of a groove for yourself. You have perspective. There’s a line in the book about going on a trip with uni friends and everyone having been in love with at least one other person there at some point, and that's exactly it: when you've had Big Feelings a few times you develop a bit more of a sense of proportion about them. You stop seeing them as the absolute most important thing and start feeling yourself drawn to the quieter voices inside pulling you in directions that you haven't found it as easy to hear over all the ruckus.

I don't want to put words into the author's mouth but reading this I found myself reminded of some things that happened to me. In the middle of 2019, a perfect storm of Really Bad Stuff knocked me into a depressive episode and I stopped going to church. I had been finding it increasingly difficult to attend the church I was going to at the time anyway for various reasons, so I just gave up entirely. In early 2020, when things were starting to look up again (before they stopped doing so altogether for bigger-picture reasons) I started looking for churches. I had a feeling I wanted to go to somewhere more liturgical. I couldn't have told you why, but I just had a feeling, an inclination, a pull in a certain direction. I'm reminded of Elijah's encounter with God at Mount Horeb: the "still small voice". Reading this book felt like seeing someone tune into that voice in real-time.

If you wanted you could probably say that this book—written by someone who seems on my general wavelength, has developed the same opinions as me on certain prominent figures in the modern church and (spoilers) by the end finds her way to a church that seems not a million miles away from my own—in certain respects flatters my predjudices. That's true enough, but what kept me reading was the genuinely affecting portrayal of the author's journey of faith. It's not showy (at times it's profoundly ambivalent) but it's real. She's real about what affects her, what connects her with the divine and what doesn't. In kind with the direction in which her faith develops, it avoids the neatness and triteness of certainty. Even if she doesn't capture some generational movement, it's enough to see how she is moved by her encounters.

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