The Book Club: why are Gen Z turning to Christianity?

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 23 April 2025

⏱️ 40 minutes

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Summary

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Lamorna Ash, author of Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion. She describes to me how a magazine piece about some young friends who made a dramatic conversion to Christianity turned into an investigation into the rise in faith among a generation that many assumed would be the most secular yet — and into a personal journey towards religious belief.

Transcript

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0:00.0	On Thursday the 15th of May, the Spectator is hosting a live book club event.
0:05.5	Sam Leith, the host of this podcast, will be joined by former Telegraph editor-in-chief
0:09.8	and military historian Max Hastings.
0:12.3	It will be an opportunity to talk about Max's new book, Sword, D-Day, Trial by Battle,
0:17.6	as well as mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day.
0:22.2	The full details are as follows.
0:28.5	7.30 on Thursday the 15th of May at the Shaw Theatre in Houston, London, and tickets start from £27.50, although I believe there are ticket options that include a signed copy of the book.
0:34.3	For those tickets, go to www. Spectator.com.com.com. We look forward to seeing you there.
0:45.1	Hello and welcome to Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for
0:51.5	The Spectator, and my guest this week is the writer in LeMorna, Ash, whose new book is Don't Forget We're Here Forever, a new generation search
0:59.2	religion.
0:59.9	Le Mourna, welcome.
1:01.5	This is a sort of wide-ranging personal investigation into contemporary Christianity, I guess,
1:07.2	is the right way to frame it.
1:10.6	Can you talk a bit about how you started on this? It doesn't
1:14.1	seem like a very obvious thing from millennial stroke Gen Z as you are to be investigating.
1:20.3	Yeah, it was not obvious to me at all. The way it came about was I just quit my job and I was
1:26.3	looking, I really wanted to do some more long form writing.
1:29.3	And I had all these ideas. And I heard this story from one of my close friends who said,
1:33.9	did you know that comedy double act from university, they've both converted to Christianity
1:38.0	simultaneously and now they both want to be priests. And even the idea of a priest, I barely
1:42.8	knew what a priest was. I went to church
	...

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