2024 - the year Christianity bounced back?

From the opinion sites to the churchyard, we’re seeking a better way to live.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A man sits in a church pew below a colourful stained glass window, looking pensive.

Karl Fredrickson on Unsplash.

Was 2024 the year Christianity turned a corner? Throughout the year, on substacks, websites, YouTube videos, and Instagram posts, the signs kept cropping up of what Re-Enchanting co-host Justin Brierley has called the Surprising Rebirth of Faith in God.

Over recent years, and throughout 2024, we have seen a stream of public figures declaring various degrees of interest in Christianity, or even full-on faith. Rowan Williams described the usual suspects well, imagining a scene in an English Churchyard: “Some… have been professed believers (Francis Spufford, Nick Cave, Paul Kingsnorth), some have lingered in the church porch (Tom Holland, Philip Goff), some are still on a bench in the grounds (Alain de Botton).” And there is Ayaan Hirsi Ali (singing along from the pews), Russell Brand (posting Instagram reels from the font?), Louise Perry (on the bench, next to de Botton?), Jordan Peterson (sometimes in the pulpit, sometimes in the porch), and even Richard Dawkins (smiling at the choir’s rendition of Silent Night as he wanders past).

In the USA, it’s similar. Yet more complicated. The alliance of Evangelicalism with Donald Trump is problematic, to say the least. J.D. Vance is a serious Christian, having made the journey from an evangelical church upbringing, through student atheism into Roman Catholicism. Shia LeBoeuf and Candace Owens are among other US celebrities finding faith recently, while academic Rod Dreher’s public journey into Eastern Orthodoxy has been watched by many. On our Re-Enchanting podcast, Molly Worthen is a good example of why, despite everything, sceptics like her can still find faith in the USA.

In the UK’s Assisted Dying debate, the place of religion was a hot topic. The case made against the bill by Christians gained a strong hearing, so much so that secular voices started crying foul, arguing that religious voices should not be heard, or at least, such people should declare their hand (though the number of people starting their case with ‘I’m a secular person, and that may colour my beliefs on this, but…” were hard to find).

In public life, explicitly Christian writers such as Rowan Williams, Elizabeth Oldfield, Nicholas Spencer, Madeline Davies, Giles Fraser and Marcus Walker command an audience, and maybe this website - Seen & Unseen - in its own small way is helping to provide a stronger, more intelligent Christian voice in culture.

Nonetheless, let’s not get carried away. The Assisted Dying bill passed. Despite the celebrity names, numbers going to church continue to fall, and the public assumptions of the culture remain firmly secular.

Recent articles in the Spectator express the dilemma well. A. N. Wilson pens a gloomy assessment of the prospects of Christianity in the west, entitled Is the End of Christendom Nigh?, looking out from his pew on a dwindling local congregation of elderly people, watching the lights go out on Christian culture in the west. Yet at the same time Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes a piece about her second Christmas as a Christian, called A Christian Revival is Under Way. Which is it? Maybe to adjudicate, an editorial, presumably written by its new editor, Michael Gove, entitled In Defence of Faith makes a strong case for Christian faith and its place in national life.

Anecdotally, at the local level, stories abound of people stepping into churches, seeking some kind of meaning in life and re-engaging with faith. Sometimes it’s the powerful emotion of charismatic or Pentecostal worship, sometimes the majesty of cathedrals or the mystery of Orthodox liturgy. Our local church in Oxford has a regular stream of stories of students exploring and finding faith and I keep hearing the same story in churches across the country.

“People need meaning, and the secular world didn’t come up with the goods.”

Nick Cave

My take on this, for what it’s worth, is that western culture has run out of steam, either temporarily or for good. In the twentieth century, both Fascism and Communism rose and fell. Francis Fukuyama declared the ‘end of history’ in the triumph of secular, liberal, consumer capitalism. Yet this too has run out of steam, increasingly felt to be spiritually hollow and politically suspect. ‘Woke culture’ was an attempt to restore a set of moral values to restrain the unpleasant and unjust effects of the unbridled market, yet its stridency and aggressiveness, its Canute-like attempt to resist aspects of natural order, not to mention its adoption of a destructive fixation on a reductive identity politics has generated a backlash of its own.

The elections of 2024 were instructive. Keir Starmer won not because he offered a compelling vision but because he said so little. There was no ‘Yes We Can’ Obama slogan, no Blairite ‘New Labour, New Britain’ moment. No-one knew what he stood for, but we were so fed up with the Conservatives that we just wanted them out. Even with Trump in the USA, unlike last time, people knew what they were getting, yet they voted for him anyway, mainly because they felt he would fix the economy and immigration better than the Democrats who had failed on both.

Nick Cave put it well in a recent interview in the Times: “people need meaning, and the secular world didn’t come up with the goods.” The perennial human search for purpose and significance hasn’t gone away, and there is not much on offer in secular culture. So, people are suddenly open to exploring more ancient stores of wisdom.

Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that just at the time when we might be seeing the stirring of an openness to the spiritual, the numinous and the religious, the Church (at least in the UK - other places may be doing better) seems in no state to capitalise. The Church of England has been absorbed in a lengthy and acrimonious debate over human sexuality and same-sex marriage over the past five years, the Archbishop of Canterbury has had to resign over the Church’s failure to enact a properly functioning safeguarding culture, and the free churches are in free fall.

So, what are the prospects for 2025? Maybe the Church of England can find a settlement in its civil war on sexuality, finding a way for the warring parties to live together, even if it has to be at some distance within the same church for a while. Then we might see which side (or perhaps both in their different ways?) might be better placed to appeal to jaded, secular people who are waking up to the lack of meaning in their lives and the potential of Christian faith to offer a satisfying vision of reality and a new way of living.

Perhaps a new Archbishop of Canterbury might come in, untainted by past safeguarding failures, and, despite the impossibilities of the job, able to steadily steer the church towards its spiritual heart. At the end of his monumental and increasingly influential The Master and his Emissary, neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist (not a Christian himself) makes a telling point: “The Western Church has in my view been active in undermining itself. It no longer has the confidence to stick to its values but instead joins the chorus of voices attributing material answers to spiritual problems.”

Back in 1930, an Anglican lay mystic from Notting Hill, Evelyn Underhill wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, Cosmo Lang with words that put their finger on what the Church might need now:

“God”, she wrote “is the interesting thing about religion, and people are hungry for God.” She went on: “We look to the Church to give us an experience of God, mystery, holiness and prayer which, though it may not solve the antinomies of the natural world, shall lift us to contact with the supernatural world and minister eternal life.”

A church that is seen as ‘a dull echo of the liberal consensus’ as the former Bishop of London, Richard Chartres used to say, is hardly worth the candle. If the message of the church is a vaguely religious version of what you can already find in the Guardian (or the Telegraph for that matter) then why bother with it?

As Rod Dreher put it recently: “only the return of strong religion - one that makes demands, offers compelling explanations to the problems of death and suffering, and gives worshippers a visceral sense of connecting to the living God - has any hope of competing in the post Christian marketplace.”

In 2024, religion in general and Christianity in particular has never been far from the front pages, for better or worse. God has not gone away. Dreher may well be right. And the Church, if it is to make the most of a season where troubled people are beginning to look its way again may need to take notice.

Review

Belief

Books

Culture

28 May 2025

4 min read

Could Lamorna Ash become a Christian in a year?

Moving, funny and beautifully written, this young writer’s quest for faith has lessons for all of us.

Lucy Denyer

Lucy is a writer and editor.

Lamorna Ash.

When two of Lamorna Ash’s university friends decided to leave behind their lives as standup comedians and train to become priests, Ash was fascinated. She interviewed them and wrote an essay about it for the Guardian but, by the time her piece came out, knew she was “not finished with Christianity.”

“Perhaps it was naive not to have anticipated how spending my days alongside two fresh converts… would have some cumulative effect on me,” she writes. “Through these encounters, it was as if the very corner of the sky had been pulled back. I couldn’t see what was going on behind it, but I understood it was there for them… they taught me how to believe in the belief of others… their stories became the starting point.”

And so Ash bought a second hand Toyota Corolla, stocked the glove box with CDs and set off on a Christian road-trip around the country that started with a Christianity Explored course and ended with a series of meetings with people who were consciously ‘dechurching’, taking in Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Quakers, Anabaptists and a YWAM community along the way. She books in ‘desert times’ on Iona; in Walsingham; at a silent Jesuit retreat. She walks, and talks, and tries to pray and thinks. Throughout her travels, Ash carried a ‘jokey’ question in the back of her mind to frame her research: could she become a Christian in a year?

The result of her quest is this book: tender, fascinating, moving, funny and beautifully written. Throughout my reading of Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever I kept thinking of people I would like to give it to, Christian and non-Christian alike. Ash has achieved a remarkable feat: to make faith and its pursuit a compelling subject regardless of whether you’re a believer or not.

Primarily, this is because she has not - joke question aside - set out with an agenda, other than to more fully understand what makes believers tick (and, she admits, because it is something to write about). Though she is scathing about Rico Tice, whom she finds performative and evasive, and finds the dogma of the Christianity Explored course too rigid and inflexible for her liking, she is sympathetic towards and interested in her fellow Christianity Explored small group companions - and is self-aware enough to admit that during this time she “played the worst version of myself: hackles raised, on alert, unable to let a conversation pass without some interjection”. Though she finds the intensity of Youth With A Mission’s community - along with the fact that many of the staff are married to each other - a bit much, she is individually drawn to some of the people who work there, and reflective about what and why they’re doing. As someone who has grown up with faith, it is fascinating to see what we often take for granted held up to scrutiny by someone who is not there to be deliberately combative, but to try and understand.

“I am still too close to it to tell you definitively all the ways the encounters… changed me,” Ash writes. “What it felt like at the time, though, was that each conversation was leading me to places in my own mind I had never visited before.”

There are elements of Ash’s book I am intrigued by, but sceptical of: her suggestion, for example, that the Bible should not stop where it does, but might be continually added to, “like a divine Wikipedia, updated in perpetuity.” Her theological understanding is not, perhaps understandably, advanced. She is a self-confessed product of her era: young, progressive, queer, and her readings of and understandings of other people are framed through that lens.

But despite its failings, Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever remains compelling because of its curiosity - a curiosity that Ash wonders might be the place “where God exists”; its attempts, however stumbling, to understand faith rather than just dismiss it. It is an atheist Quaker who teaches Ash “how I might approach Christianity: it was supposed to be a challenge.” You will have to read it to learn where Ash herself ends up, but her book extends the challenge to those of us who might benefit from a similar scrutiny of what we believe - not to fall out of faith, but also to understand it, and God, more.

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