His positions all sounded so much less stable than I had remembered

Don't Forget We're Here Forever, Lamorna Ash

For Max, this abject world is accelerating towards further horrors. Evil is everywhere and, because queerness is external to his understanding, because it is easy to attach it to or even see it as the cornerstone of contemporary liberal attitudes to sex, he, like so many others, has become obsessed with it. I couldn’t take the ‘gotcha’ element of the email. I didn’t have the energy to argue back. I set out in the rain on the day of his baptism, and then I limped back home.

I am ashamed now that I didn’t witness the culmination of Max’s conversion. The shame arrived as soon as I listened back to our interview several months later, when I heard his actual human voice trying to work it out. ‘I’m in no position to be condemning anyone,’ he had said at one point. And then he spoke about his religious doubt. It returns when he does not pray for a while, or when he falls back into old sins and coping mechanisms, and begins to wonder how can there be a loving God in a world like this. Ultimately, he had become a Christian because he had wanted to be made whole. There are so many things I do in the hope they might make me whole. On listening back to our conversation, his positions all sounded so much less stable than I had remembered. I reduced Max. I made him into someone I owed nothing.

This is from the just-released Don’t Forget We're Here Forever by Lamorna Ash. I am an admirer of Ash’s work and this book is not disappointing me, quite the opposite. She spends time really getting to know evangelicals, taking part in Quaker meetings, staying on Christian retreats, all in pursuit of understanding why so many of her peers seem to be becoming religious. She goes to Bible class, drives hundreds of miles, interviews dozens of people. I bought it as soon as it was out and started reading it right away. What I enjoy most, as in this extract, is that the book is always thinking, always trying to understand.