Eventually, Ash finds in herself a gradual attraction, not only to religious practice but to the wild disharmonies of belief. Her mother is sliding into late-stage dementia, and Ash yearns for a new source of meaning, something substantial and hard-won. “I was there to wrestle,” she writes, of early visits to religious services, “to be undone.” She tries to discern why she feels called to Christianity even as she finds some of its history abhorrent. Ash’s slow courtship with faith is moving, both because it’s colored by her impending loss and because of how she embraces the uncanny. “Once, I believed prayer was tantamount to wishing for something you could not hope to get,” Ash writes. She comes to see it, instead, as a “radical, active and quite literal acceptance.” Reflecting on the memoir “Love’s Work,” which was written by the philosopher Gillian Rose as she died of cancer and which opens with the epigraph “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not,” Ash writes:
Even as Ash ventures into the less accessible parts of faith, there’s a hint of moderation here, too. “You are imagining yourself,” she writes. “Try” to speak “as if to a god.” Perhaps, Ash seems to suggest, you can pretend your way to the benefits of prayer. But her agonized attempts to telegraph her despair into another dimension capture something different: for it to really matter, you have to believe.
Osgood’s book aims to make religious conversion intelligible to the nonbeliever; meanwhile, many of Ash’s sources resist this sort of intelligibility at every turn, fearing that a religion compatible with the secular world is not enough of a religion at all. The tension between accessibility and maintaining a boundaried tradition is an existential one for every faith, especially as religion has shifted gently, across centuries, to accommodate greater individual choice. “The Chance of Salvation,” Lincoln A. Mullen’s 2017 history of conversion in the U.S., persuasively details the ways in which modern religion shaped—and was shaped by—the American project, spawning new systems of belief; hybrid theologies; backlashes toward fundamentalism; and a more individualized approach to faith. Mullen memorably details the nineteenth-century invention of “the sinner’s prayer,” a tool for evangelism that simplified the process of conversion into a single act of confession. To some, this was a savvy innovation; to others, it was an opportunistic distortion. “Their religion,” one critic wrote of such revivalist practices, “apart from the occasional whirlwinds of excitement in which they are allowed to figure in their favorite way, may be said to be characteristically superficial and cold.”
The religious landscape depicted in Osgood and Ash’s books is one where conversion appears more readily available than at any time before, as the internet offers endless potential for incidental contact with alternative versions of life. (Max, the convert from “Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever,” is radicalized to a conservative Christian faith after being served videos of anti-abortion pastors on YouTube.) What’s striking is that their subjects appear to choose faith because they want to approach it the hard way—the way that defies the sensibilities of the modern world. A woman named Orianne who appears in “Godstruck” joins a nunnery in part because she’s drawn to the challenge of lifelong celibacy. “When you marry somebody you give up a lot, including some things that we would label as freedoms,” she tells Osgood. “You’re tied to someone; you’ve bound yourself to someone. So it’s kind of a similar thing.”
There’s a moment in “Don’t Forget” in which Ash visits an evangelical youth gathering, one of the sort she finds aesthetically and politically unappealing. (Seeing the word FAITH! spraypainted on a building upon her arrival, she drags on her cigarette, and tells herself to get a grip.) A teen-ager approaches her to say that she has a word from God to share, and that the word is “Beloved.” Ash explains that this is an evangelizing process called treasure hunting—listening for God’s voice to share with strangers—and though she doesn’t yet consider herself a Christian, she finds herself surprisingly moved to tears. The encounter, like so many others in the book, captures an intrinsic challenge of writing about faith: the realm of belief can be so personal, so bizarre, that it begs for language that can’t be counted, verified, or corroborated. But religion has its own language for the elements that generate its centripetal force: being set apart, purified, chosen, favored, ordained, redeemed, made holy. Transformed. ♦
