Five years ago, Lamorna Ash imagined church to be solemn, hushed, and faintly austere, a place of ritual and restraint.

What she didn’t imagine was how radically churches could differ. Today, she’s speaking at my church, which hums with chatter, laughter, the smell of warm croissants and bacon.

Children chase each other between folding chairs, while a small travel cage of rats is passed around for anyone brave enough to hold them. Margate Union Church is fiercely inclusive.

Why, they even let me in. No hierarchy, no judgement: just a kaleidoscope of humanity in all its eccentric glory.

Ash, who describes herself as “queer” in her new book, Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever (2025), didn’t grow up with any religion.

Yet in her late twenties, she noticed something strange: many of her friends - the secular, sceptical generation - were turning towards Christianity.

Intrigued, she began attending different churches, trying to understand why faith, which once seemed irrelevant, or even oppressive, was making an unlikely comeback among the young.

Since 2018, there’s been a 56% rise in those claiming to attend church at least once a month, with young people - particularly young men - leading this quiet revolution.

In 2018, just 4% of 18 to 24-year-olds said they went to church regularly.

By 2024, that figure had quadrupled to 16%. For young men, the growth was especially strong: from 4% to 21%.

For young women, from 3% to 12%. A generation often dismissed as secular and screen-addled is, it seems, re-engaging with the divine.

Why now? Covid is often cited: young people emerged from that bizarre solitary confinement desperately seeking a sense of community, identity, belonging.

Others point to the politicisation of Christian imagery by the far right, who have cynically repurposed crosses and cathedrals as props in a nationalist theatre.

Groups funded by conservative American evangelical movements have been particularly effective at fusing “Christian values” with anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-abortion rhetoric.

The far-right anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson, for example, claims to have found Christianity in prison, and has since woven Christian themes and symbols into his fiery public performances.

Ash tells us that Robinson’s Christianity, and that of his followers, bears little resemblance to the faith she’s encountered.

Their version, she argues, is built on fear and certainty - the twin enemies of wonder.

True Christianity, by contrast, depends on curiosity. It takes humility to admit you don’t have all the answers, the courage to be changed by encounter, and the willingness to meet the stranger as your equal. “To be curious,” she says, “you have to feel safe enough to be wrong.”

The idea that doubt is not the opposite of faith but its engine feels radical in an age of absolutism.

The far right cannot afford curiosity; their ideology collapses the moment they truly see the humanity of those they condemn.

Real faith demands the opposite: a willingness to look closely, to listen, to recognise that every person you meet could alter your understanding of the world. The smallest remark from a stranger might help you survive another day.

Ash suggests that the church’s role is not to market itself to the young — not to chase relevance or dilute its seriousness — but to remain a place where people can come when life undoes them.

“As Philip Larkin said,” she reminds us, “‘these are serious houses on serious earth.’ Churches are not supposed to be cool. They are where you go when you are struggling, grieving, searching. That’s their meaning.”

And perhaps that’s why young people are returning - not to be entertained, but to be steadied.

In a world of constant flux, where every opinion is provisional and every connection transient, the church offers something startlingly countercultural: stillness.

It offers an invitation not to shout louder but to listen more deeply. To sit in a room with strangers, croissants, children and baby rats, and be reminded that belonging isn’t something you perform, it’s something you practice.