On a recent Sunday, the writer Lamorna Ash was observing an hour of silence in a Quaker meeting house in North London, a small brick building with a bright yellow door. Sitting among mostly elderly people with silver pixie cuts and sensible sweaters, Ms. Ash, 31, stuck out in orange Adidas sneakers and cargo pants. She closed her eyes.
After the silent hour concluded, a Quaker elder approached and gently noted that she hadn’t seen Ms. Ash at the Quaker meetings in quite a while. She had been thinking of reaching out, she said, but then heard that Ms. Ash had “gone Anglican.”
“I move between them,” Ms. Ash said, smiling wryly.
“You’re bi!” the elder offered.
“I’m bi,” Ms. Ash agreed.
Last May, Ms. Ash had published a book, “Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever,” about Christian conversions and a wave of curiosity toward faith that she had noticed among members of her generation and those younger.
Toward the end of her time reporting and researching the book, Ms. Ash, who was initially agnostic, started attending an Anglican church.
Ms. Ash often spends Saturday nights at sloppy house parties where D.J.s play trancey sets, and her Sunday mornings in church pews. That was not the case just three years ago when Ms. Ash, a reporter who considered herself firmly nonreligious, decided to write about experimenting with different types of Christian prayers and rituals.
The idea came to her when she was reporting a story about a comedy duo from her college days who decided to become Anglican priests; she looked around and over time noticed that so many people her age, twenty-somethings, seemed newly open to exploring belief in God.
“We are leagues away from the New Atheist movement of the 1990s,” Ms. Ash wrote in her book, noting that many people she interviewed had been shaped by the social rupture of the pandemic and the isolation brought on by screen addiction, which left them searching for a sense of wonder and community.
Ms. Ash set out, in late 2022, on a series of road trips in a pockmarked Toyota Corolla. She was on a quest to meet young people across Britain undergoing Christian conversions. She stayed at a training school for aspiring missionaries, at an ancient monastery on a Scottish island known as the “cradle of Christianity” and at a nunnery, in many of them meeting pious strangers bemused by Ms. Ash, a youthful gay person asking sincere questions and scribbling in a notebook.
“A conversion can be an instant apocalypse or an incremental evolution,” Ms. Ash wrote in “Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever.” “It might come from nowhere, or outside of yourself, or exist dormant inside you already as a latent tendency, waiting for its right moment to spring.”
Ms. Ash’s book — a little bit St. Augustine’s “Confessions,” a little bit Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” — is the follow-up to her 2020 debut, “Dark, Salt, Clear,” an account of her months living in a tiny Cornish fishing village and spending long stretches at sea with the fishermen on their trawlers.
That book plunged readers into a faraway world, one that reeked of gutted cuttlefish and tasted like salty harbor air; the new one wrestles with questions laced through recent headlines about Christian nationalism, young people’s loneliness and political flux.
Ms. Ash investigates the broader social trend of religious revival — Pew polling last year in America found that Christianity was no longer in decline, a shift driven by young people — but also more personally about the texture of self change. She hurtles herself at experiences that have the potential to transform: “If I kept putting myself in the way of Christianity,” she writes, “would I eventually be converted?”
At one point, while Ms. Ash sat in a Pentecostal church in North London, the pastor declared that his “prophetic gift” was telling him that somebody in the packed room needed saving. Then he pointed a finger directly at Ms. Ash and said: “You.”
Sometimes publishing a book conveniently coincides with reaching tidy conclusions. But Ms. Ash says her years of reporting on religious belief has if anything left her more ambivalent, both about whether she believes in God and about the simple question of where she should spend Sunday mornings.
After the Quaker meeting that December morning, a church elder invited Ms. Ash to join others who had stuck around for tea and homemade oat cookies. The low-key gathering felt wildly different than her reporting at an evangelical Bible study group, where the minister believed that gay sex was sinful.
At the entryway to the Quaker House hung a sign that read: “Thou shalt decide for yourself.”
Throughout her reporting, Ms. Ash tussled with the disquieting experience of straddling two worlds — attending an evangelical Bible study group one evening and then another night making out with a couple at a party in Tottenham; spending Holy Week at a pilgrimage site meditating on the meaning of Easter, and then returning home to find friends celebrating spring and listening to music, their feet caked with dirt after playing barefoot volleyball.
At that gathering, Ms. Ash told one bemused friend: “Listen, in the car back I had this weird thought that maybe I should become celibate.” She is part pilgrim but also part Martian, rocketing between planets that are dubious of one another while insisting she came very much in peace.
“I went on a date and she was like, ‘Yeah, my friends told me on a night out that I shouldn’t go on a date with you because you’re apparently all Christian now,’” Ms. Ash recalled, laughing and then adopting a pitying, pleading expression. “I was like, ‘Oh no! You can still go on a date with me!”
After the Quaker meeting, Ms. Ash drove home and greeted two of her roommates, who have gently teased her about these long, serious periods of religious wrestling. They grew accustomed to finding Ms. Ash in pajamas in their kitchen, bent over a Christian history book and muttering to herself: “Why do there have to be so many denominations?”
Their three-bedroom home, in the Gospel Oaks neighborhood, is slightly too small for four people and crammed with books. Some are by authors Ms. Ash considers models for her own writing, like Gary Indiana, Iris Murdoch and John Jeremiah Sullivan, who in his book “Pulphead” writes exuberantly about his own cast off evangelical upbringing and the unexpected gang of friends he meets at a Christian rock festival.
Ms. Ash’s home has been a refuge through book-writing years that have been not just intellectually perplexing, but also personally turbulent. Her mother began to display new signs of dementia as she wrote the book. Back when Ms. Ash was reporting on the Cornish fishing village, she delighted in calling her mother to relate what she’d seen aboard the trawlers. This time she couldn’t share her work as it came together. It was like writing with one crucial phantom audience member.
Leaving home and walking toward the British Library, past low-slung brick shops and a winding canal, Ms. Ash said she has known for years that dementia ran on her mother’s side of the family. It is partly this knowledge that has left her so preoccupied with preserving experiences, remembering details. She is obsessed with keeping notebooks: capturing the way the moon looked behind a smoky cloud one night on Parliament Hill, or what it felt like to be on a glamorous reporting assignment in Paris in autumn when she learned her father had cancer.
“Drove down late last night under a big white moon — somewhere you could see a ‘blood moon’, but not where I was,” she wrote in one recent diary entry.
Then in another: “Mum came in from the garden crying to herself because she couldn’t work out how to plant the irises and she said, tearfully, so little, ‘I used to have a brain.’”
Along the route to the library, Ms. Ash stopped in at the bookstore where she used to volunteer, a charity shop with a little corner devoted to books on faith. Ms. Ash, standing in front of the religion shelf, was amused to see that a book she had donated was still sitting there, a version of the Bible rewritten in a conversational, youthful tone.
“First off, nothing. No light, no time, no substance, no matter,” the book starts out, summarizing Genesis. “God starts it all up and WHAP! Stuff everywhere!”
Emma Goldberg is a Times reporter who writes about political subcultures and the way we live now.
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