2025-10-01
45 分钟This is The Guardian. Hello, I am Namona Ash and I am the author of Divine Comedy, the stand-up double act to turn to the priesthood.
which was originally published in 2022.
What drew me to the story was curiosity and complete ignorance.
So for me, a story about Christianity, about young people converting to Christianity today seemed so alien and impossibly distant from the kind of life that I seem to be living in my mid-twenties that I just thought, well, if anything else, at least that would just be fascinating.
So when I first I was interviewing them, I knew nothing about the subject, it was really one of those ones where each new piece of information about what it's like to become a Christian, all the different aspects of that, both the places that you go to, the churches you visit, the prayers that you learn, the hymns you sing, the reading of the Bible, it was all new to me and I think that made it such an exciting piece to get to write.
What has changed since the article came out?
The answer is sort of everything, because I've spent the last three years after writing that piece into being so many other converts to all these different parts of Christianity.
And during that process, I became so much more immersed in the Christian faith than I'd ever anticipated.
And it meant that, and this was already happening whilst I was writing that piece, it was this movement from skepticism slash ignorance towards real interest and empathy and also a curiosity that also made me wonder if Christianity was not something that I wanted to get involved in as well, that I wondered if anyone can convert and I was meeting so many young people who were, maybe I could too.
And then I suppose it means that all the questions, I now know so much more about Christianity or its denominations or its different flavours, its history than I did when I was writing that piece and I think that would have produced a completely different piece if I was entering the writing of it, the interviewing of it.
not as someone with no knowledge.
And so I actually think that I'm really glad that I wrote the piece when I did because it has this sense of awe in it and surprise at every turn that I think someone who'd been already thinking about Christianity for lots of years, they would just produce something really different.
So I think that was kind of a joy for it.
But definitely where I am now, even the kinds of questions that I'd ask someone who's converting and my knowledge around it, it would just be very different.
Ultimately, I'm so grateful to David Wolf for commissioning me to write this long read because my career would have been a completely different place as a writer if it wasn't for it because writing this piece, again, I just became obsessed with Christianity with the concept of conversion with the state of young people across the nation at the moment.
And it then meant that I went and pitched my editors from my book publisher and said, listen, I think that this is a story that I have found in one place.
This is bound to be a story all over the country.
and so my interviews with this comedy double act then end up growing so much larger which is the book that I just published which is Don't Forget We're Here Forever a new generation search for religion in which It's similar to the concept of the Divine Comedy piece but ultimately I was off in a car going all over Britain, spending time along recent converts, along people who have had these radical shifts in the way they think about their faith, from conservative evangelicalism to radical atheist Quakers, looking at all these different shapes of Christianity and forms and flavours that emerge all over the place all the time.
This long read contains language some listeners may find offensive.
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