Long read: Here’s what happened when a former Christian attended an Alpha Course

In the early years of this century, an important existential debate was being waged via the medium of buses.

It all started in 2001, when the Alpha Course launched a £1m marketing campaign. Billing itself as ‘an opportunity to explore the meaning of life’, the course plastered its adverts over 3,000 buses, 75 London Underground stations and 1,500 major billboards. The ads asked questions like ‘Is this it?’, ‘Is there more to life than this?’, and, pertinently for a bus, ‘Where are we going?’. It was all a bit more sophisticated than writing ‘Jesus saves’ on a sandwich board, which was what passed for Christian PR in my town. But the implication was more or less the same.

The Alpha Course was already well known by this stage, even without the bus ads. A 10-week introduction to Christianity, it had started life in Holy Trinity Brompton Church in Knightsbridge, before spreading to some 7,000 churches nationwide and, eventually, to 24 million people in over 100 countries. By 2001, an estimated million Brits had attended one. These included the former Blue Peter presenter Diane Louise Jordan, the disgraced Tory MP Jonathan Aitken, the onetime Page 3 girl Samantha Fox, and the grandee of millennium prayers Sir Cliff Richard.

That summer, ITV had broadcast a TV series called ‘Alpha: Will it Change their Lives?” There’s a truism within journalism that, if a headline ends with a question mark, the answer is no. Not so here. Critics pointed out the programme’s obvious lack of impartiality, while the National Secular Society complained to regulators that ITV had filmed ‘a 10-hour advert for the Alpha Course’.

As a 15-year-old churchgoer, I was excited about the bus ads, not to mention the TV series. As far as my church was concerned, they clearly signified that God was at work and revival was about to sweep the nation. The reason most people don’t believe in Jesus, we figured, is that they haven’t had the good news presented to them in a suitably compelling way. The Alpha Course was changing that. It was blazing a trail through unbelief, one bus at a time.

Eight years (and one catastrophic loss of faith) later, I had occasion to get excited about a different bus ad. This time round, the ad read: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life”.

This was the Atheist Bus Campaign, created by the writer Ariane Sherine and supported by the British Humanist Association. It was a direct riposte to Christian advertising like Alpha’s. As Sherine related in the Guardian, she had seen two bus ads for the organisation JesusSaid.org, which read ‘When the son of man comes, will he find faith on the earth? (Luke 18:8)’. Innocuous enough you might think, but when she looked at their website she was informed she’d ‘spend all eternity in torment in hell’. She figured this was maybe a bit much for her morning commute.

Her campaign raised over £150,000, including £5,500 from Richard Dawkins. That was enough to fund 800 atheist buses across the UK, as well as posters on the London Underground and two animated screens in Oxford Street. Despite including the word ‘probably’, which helped ensure the message didn’t flout advertising rules, these were the most irreligious vehicles ever to have trawled the streets of London. They inspired copycat campaigns in the US and beyond, as well as a predictable pushback from Christian organisations. “There definitely is a God. So join the Christian Party and enjoy your life,” contended the Christian Party somewhat cheekily, also via a bus.

I have no idea why buses were such a spiritual battleground in the noughties. I know I haven’t seen a religiously affiliated public transport vehicle for quite a while. But at the time, it was like my own shifting views had leapt out of my head and onto the side of the 453.

In 2009, I was living in London and caught an atheist bus on more than one occasion. I was also a committed non-believer and hard-nosed, science-oriented sceptic. I railed against irrationality, idolised Christopher Hitchens, and wrote in my blog: ‘These days, I think spoonfeeding children the more exotic strains of Christianity is tantamount to feeding them Ebola’.

Most of the time, the non-existence of God was so obvious to me as to be barely worth my attention. During my messy exit from religion, some years earlier, I had gone through all the arguments for and against, weighing up Pascal’s Wager against Occam’s razor against Russell’s teapot. I had become convinced that the atheist arguments had the upper hand, and that the only reason anyone believed in God was through a combination of logical fallacies and wishful thinking. That was all in the past though, and most of that discussion now struck me as a tedious academic irrelevance.

I wouldn’t have called myself ‘spiritual’ either. What with its woo-woo connotations, and lack of semantic precision, the word made me feel a bit icky. Growing up, there had been a shop named Guru Boutique in my town, which sold things like incense, crystals and henna tattooing cones. I liked the smells in there, and had enjoyed the faintly transgressive feeling it gave me — like I’d stumbled across some kind of New Age Aladdin’s cave. But I was very much a tourist in these spaces, and a snarky one at that. Just as I didn’t want to waste my time arguing against an imaginary God, I didn’t lie awake at night contemplating the colour of my aura or the workings of homeopathic water memory.

The meaning of life, as far as I was concerned, was whatever you decided for yourself. Any larger claims about the universe struck me as faintly bonkers at best, and dastardly attempts to manipulate the populace at worst.

If I thought about religion at all, it was only during trips home to see my family. My parents and youngest sister still went to church, whereas my two middle sisters were as hell-bound as I was. I remember a sense of being split into factions — although that was probably a projection, as I was 23 and angrier about the whole God business than I realised. For the most part, religion was a forgotten irrelevance, akin to my onetime crush on Leonardo DiCaprio or the imaginary friend I had when I was nine.

It was only a few years later, once I’d started a new journalism job and befriended my co-workers, that I realised the ex-Christian part of my life might bear further investigation. Over an after-work pint or three, I’d tell them stories about my old church, how people spoke in tongues and saw visions and swayed about while worshipping till they fell, writhing, to the floor. I’d tell them about Stoneleigh Bible Week, which we’d attended every summer — 28,000 evangelical Christians ‘getting drunk on the Holy Spirit’ from a cattle shed in Warwickshire. I’d tell them about the Alpha Course, which I knew was less about exploring the meaning of life and more about saving people from the fiery bowels of hell.

My co-workers were fascinated. In common with most of my friends, they had been brought up in secular homes, viewing religion only peripherally through school assemblies and Christmas. They had encountered happy-clappy Christians of course — mostly ones who were looking to convert them — and had given them a wide berth. But they hadn’t met an ex-believer in the wild before, at least not an ex-believer who had done things like speak in tongues and get baptised in a swimming pool aged 14.

At the time, we were all very hung up on the idea of ‘getting scoops’, ‘finding stories’, and (only half-jokingly, I suspect), ‘becoming the next Woodward and Bernstein’. It was with this attitude, then, that we discussed how I might write an ‘expose’ on evangelical Christianity. We decided I ought to ‘infiltrate’ the Alpha Course. Was it as benignly philosophical as the bus ads made out? Or was it more a kind of cult recruitment strategy, peddling a socially conservative agenda and doing immense psychological damage to boot? Well, there was only one way to find out.

With the benefit of hindsight, the Alpha Course was never going be my Watergate. I had already been to Alpha Courses via my church, and wasn’t going to find out anything I didn’t already know. They were just a bunch of Christians. What could be less remarkable than a bunch of Christians? Any true investigative journalist would have rolled their eyes and moved on to something juicier.

Getting a scoop, then, was a flimsy rationale. I didn’t fully realise it at the time, but beneath my wannabe Louis Theroux schtick ran a much deeper and more personal motivation. Through revisiting Christianity, I was also revisiting my childhood. I was exploring something that had once held great meaning to me, and which had subsequently been wrenched away. I was tracing a kind of faultline in my psyche — the scar left behind by leaving religion — that manifested in ways I hadn’t begun to understand yet. In a way, I was searching for a piece of myself that had gone missing.

With my journalist hat on, albeit more loosely than I’d have admitted, I went ‘undercover’ to the Alpha Course in January 2012. Questions of spirituality weren’t on my agenda. And yet this would be the start of a dogged, and at times obsessive, pursuit for something suspiciously like ‘the meaning of life’.

The Alpha Course started life in the late 1970s, in a flat down the road from Holy Trinity Brompton. Back then, it was a six-week course for people who were already Christians. It developed throughout the 1980s and exploded in popularity from 1990, when Nicky Gumbel took charge. A former barrister and old Etonian, Gumbel is widely described as ‘likeable’, ‘charismatic’ and ‘charming’. He is also a branding genius, with a knack for taking a tired product and turning into something saleable.

As far as he’s concerned, people are rejecting Christianity not because it’s untrue, but because the church has an image problem.

“We are trying to present our message in a way that is contemporary,” he explained in 2011, during an interview with Ann Widdecombe of all people. “It’s the way that we welcome people, the language we use, the informality. Not only are they not put off by the packaging — they are actually attracted.”

It’s easy to see why Anglicanism might need a revamp. According to the 2018 British Social Attitudes survey, only 14% of Britons define themselves as being part of the Church of England, down from 31% in 2002. Fatally, this demographic skews old. Among 18–24 year-olds, C of E affiliation has fallen to an all-time low of 2%. You’d probably find a similar proportion who self-define as Pastafarians.

From one perspective, you could rail about how this dying institution still holds so much clout in public life. Is it OK that we have 26 Anglican bishops in the House of Lords, and that a third of all state-funded schools are faith schools, if our population is no longer Christian? From another perspective, you might get caught up in the sheer poignancy of the decline: those elderly congregations, rapidly thinning out; those beautiful arches and spires that were built as a monument to something meaningful but have since lost all signification. Or you could take the perspective of the Alpha Course, and say dwindling attendance is merely a challenge to be conquered with good PR. From just five courses in 1992, there were 18,000 courses by 2001, and 30,000 by 2018. The Alpha Course, then, is a recruitment drive for what is fast becoming a minority sect.

For the purposes of my investigation, I decided to go straight to the top. Much as I liked the idea of infiltrating the organisation, like the shadiest kind of reporter, this was annoyingly easy to arrange. I simply had to turn up at Holy Trinity Brompton at 6:30pm on a Wednesday evening, whereupon I was welcomed kindly and assigned to a group near the front.

HTB, as its congregants call it, is not your average Church of England church. With a Sunday service attendance of around 4,500 people across four sites, it is young, hip, happening and self-consciously vibrant. It’s also remarkably moneyed, courtesy of some eye-watering donations. When the power station that is now the Tate Modern came onto the market, Nicky Gumbel reportedly had the means to consider turning it into a cathedral.

As I joined my group, my first impression was one of disappointing normality. My colleagues were expecting updates, and I’d been hoping to see something bizarre straight off the bat. Even a bunch of overly earnest Christian Union types, with Jesus beards and hairy toes poking out their Birkenstocks, would have done the trick. But all I saw was a few hundred people sitting in circles eating spaghetti bolognese. They were mostly young and attractive and (not surprisingly given the SW7 postcode) there were plenty of chinos and pashminas. My group itself, which had five helpers and 11 recruits, struck me as a reasonable cross section of youngish people in a posh part of London.

As Nicky Gumbel walked past, I stared at him in a manner normally reserved for Actual Celebs.

“What’s he like, Nicky Gumbel?” I asked one of the helpers.

“Oh, he’s genuinely such a nice man,” she gushed, and I believed her, I did. But this was a man with ties to Tony Blair, who supposedly held more power in the church than the Archbishop of Canterbury. His niceness or otherwise wasn’t the issue.

Greeting us from the front, Gumbel explained the format. It would be the same every week: free food and casual chit-chat followed by an introduction to formal proceedings. Then would come worship from the Christian rock band, a 45-minute talk and the breakdown of that talk in our small groups.

This was an introductory week, designed to draw us in, and everyone was working hard to prove their normality. My group was terrifyingly friendly. The Christian rock band was reassuringly self-deprecating. And the speaker discussed hangovers and Hitchens in an attempt to placate infidels like me.

Talking to my group, I struggled to find people who hadn’t grown up with Jesus. Most were backslidden Christians looking for a refresher course, as opposed to heathens who’d seen a bus and somehow felt inspired to upend their belief system. I wondered whether this undermined the very concept of Alpha as an evangelism tool. How effective could the course be if it was, quite literally, preaching to the converted?

But some former atheists do find Jesus — Nicky Gumbel himself being one — and I wanted to find out how this might happen. What would inspire you to stick your hand into this grab bag of ancient superstitions? Why would you shrug off science and Darwin and social liberalism and everything the Enlightenment taught us? How would you get your head round Christian rock?

I left Week 1 feeling curious. My group was going to have its work cut out with me.

Each week of the Alpha Course runs through a different question about Christianity, so Week 1 is ‘Is there more to life than this?’, Week 2 is ‘Who is Jesus?’, Week 3 is ‘Why did Jesus die?’ and so on. The idea is to ease you in gently, saving the barmier stuff for near the end when you’re more likely to be receptive.

Despite its pseudo-philosophical packaging, the course struck me as quite thin on intellectual argument. Its best attempts came during Week 2, ‘Who is Jesus?’, which was supposed to explain the factual basis for Christianity.

“This talk is aimed at the head,” explained Gumbel, somewhat apologetically. “It takes a more cerebral approach than the rest of the course.”

He went on to explain some of the ‘evidence’ for Jesus. But this was a lawyer’s version of evidence, not a scientist’s. He was spinning the facts of the matter into a narrative that boosted his pre-existing case.

As the weeks went by, so many things were taken as read, there almost wasn’t any point trying to rebut the arguments. Take Week 3, ‘Why did Jesus die’? In order for this even to be a question, you’d have to assume: a) there was a historical figure called Jesus and b) there was a purpose to his death. And those assumptions just kept mounting up. The concept of salvation doesn’t make sense, for instance, unless you also buy the concept of sin.

‘Our greatest need is for forgiveness,’ read a booklet on my chair. ‘Just as someone who has cancer needs a doctor whether they realise it or not, so we need forgiveness whether we realise it or not. Just as with cancer, those who recognise their need are far better off than those who are lulled into a false sense of security.’

In some ways, this part of the course was the most pivotal, in that it explained the very crux of Christianity itself. Because of our sin, explained Gumbel, rapturously, from the front of the church, we were on course for eternal damnation. But God sent his son to take the punishment in our place. If we believe this tale and accept it deep in our hearts, we’re forgiven. You and I can have eternal life.

I cast my eye to the faithful hordes around me. On the hierarchy of Things That Were Evil, they ranked somewhere around the level of a tea cosy. And yet their inoffensiveness stood in stark contrast to what they believed, a story so cartoonishly black and white the crassest Hollywood production team would reject it.

If you want to receive God’s free gift, said Gumbel, you should pray a simple prayer. You should say sorry, thank you and please. Sorry for all my sins. Thank you for forgiving me. Please come into my life by your Holy Spirit and be with me forever. Then — bam! — eternal life.

His tones were seductive and soporific — was he trying to hypnotise me?

Later, in my group, I pelted the helpers with the textbook objections. If God wanted us to be perfect, why would he set us up for failure like that? How did evil enter the world in the first place if everything originated with a perfect God? I didn’t mean to be a saboteur, but these questions needed asking. I felt like I was lobbing my ammo, however powerful, across an insuperable gulf.

Later, as we were filing out, I saw an old man sitting in a circle of chairs, alone with one of the helpers. She had her hands laid on him in prayer; he had his head down and was weeping. I pictured the baggage of a long life swept away, the gleam of a dusty slate wiped clean. To be honest, it made me want to weep myself.

As the weeks went by, I settled into a routine. Every Wednesday night, propelled by the desire to get a story, I’d hop on the tube to Knightsbridge and hurry past Harrods to HTB. I’d eat the best meal I’d had all week, and chat to a group of people I was rapidly coming to like and respect. It wasn’t all doom, gloom and suspiciously empty tombs.

Yet often I felt myself bolting down my anger. Something dark was being masked here, underneath the thick brocade of niceness. Beneath the free food, and the soft sell approach, and the helpers’ good intentions, ran a bona fide fire-and-brimstone theology. Unsurprisingly, this had touched a nerve.

I was 17 when I sloughed off my faith. Ironically enough, the death knells came while I was helping out with my sixth form’s Student Alpha Course. While I knew all the supposed ‘answers’ to atheists’ questions (I could recite these in my sleep) I realised there was no real reason to believe in the system of Christianity as a whole. Standing, slightly shellshocked, on the outside, it all looked far more contingent than I’d thought while in its midst.

Worse, its divisive mindset had stopped making any sense. The world as I was coming to see it was not this black-and-white struggle, this unceasing duel between the forces of good and evil. Much of our everyday reality was not lived out in the moral domain at all.

As my own beliefs slipped into grey terrain, I wondered what kind of God would split us into teams like that, like some kind of sadistic PE teacher: cut a line down the middle of the human race and say “you’re in and you’re out, you’re going to heaven and you’re going to hell”. To me, it smacked more of petty tribalism than it did of divine reality. All too easily, this mindset could warp into a weapon of social control.

As a highly-strung teenager this wasn’t the happiest epiphany. I spent that year dipping in and out of belief, worried that I’d spend all eternity being punished for my thoughts.

Since then, rather than making any attempt to heal my glaring emotional wounds, I had taken the classic British approach of ignoring them and allowing them to fester. So as I progressed through the Alpha Course, I didn’t recognise my anger as unresolved trauma. No, it was the anger of the intellectual crusader. I was fuelled by the same fire that had fuelled Hitchens, Dawkins and every iconoclast throughout history. Never mind if, from the outside, I just looked like a sulky twenty-something who’d rather be down the pub.

Every Thursday morning, when I arrived at work, my colleagues would ask me if I had a scoop. Had anyone tried to brainwash me? Had anyone spiked the Kool Aid? Had Nicky Gumbel mentioned anything juicy about his good friend Tony Blair? I had to admit I didn’t have much — unless you wanted to run the headline ‘some religious ideas aren’t very logical’.

For that reason, I was determined to subject myself to the weirdest part of the course, the so-called ‘Holy Spirit Weekend Away’. This theological field trip, which takes place around Week 7, is an optional but highly recommended extra. According to the promo video beforehand, it’s a chance to spend time with friends, enjoy good food, soak up some sun, get your disco groove on and jump into English Channel with madcap abandon. Nonetheless, you can’t pack 400 Christians, or soon-to-be Christians, into a holiday village in Chichester without things getting a little bit intense.

I already knew the background to this, since it was a fundamental part of my childhood. In 1994, the Vineyard Church in Toronto was hit by a strange phenomenon. Members of the congregation were reportedly healed, transformed and overwhelmed with the Holy Spirit, an outpouring of spiritual bounties with physical signs to match.

The first time this happened, most of the 120 in attendance fell to the ground, laughing and writhing and rolling on the floor. As such incidents grew more prevalent, and spread to other churches, congregants were gripped with all kinds of reactions: shaking, crying, convulsing, roaring like lions, prophesying, speaking in tongues, even dry heaving so as to purge the negativity in their life.

Some Christians (including most people in my church) embraced the ‘Toronto Blessing’ as a sign of spiritual revival, an injection of new life into the church’s ailing frame. Others were more circumspect, seeing the episodes as mass hysteria. (Many Christians believe ‘spiritual gifts’ were confined to Jesus’ contemporaries, and are no longer possible today.) Still others pegged it as a satanic trick.

As for Nicky Gumbel? While these days, he doesn’t talk about the Toronto Blessing, he once described it as a ‘wonderful, wonderful thing’.

It was a mild Friday night in March and as the coach left London, I fell into a groggy sleep. By the time I snapped awake we were in Bracklesham Bay near Chichester, pulling up towards our Pontin’s style accommodation. Inside, the early arrivals were checking in and tucking in to an enormous dinner, as though they were trying to carb-load us into conversion.

We were supposed to be two to a dorm but an administrative blunder had given me my own bedroom. This was something to scribble in my ‘Evidence for God’ column (the exuberant cackling in the lobby outside was filed in ‘Evidence Against’). I slept well and deeply — the idea of a shiny happy roommate had filled me with a doom so great, I’d been considering doing a runner to Portsmouth and stowing myself on the next ferry to France.

The next morning, we gathered in a conference room to hear about the Holy Spirit. As Gumbel explained, what sets the Holy Spirit apart is that he isn’t just another Bible story to be accepted, but the very conduit for conversion itself. One phrase stayed with me: ‘credo ut intelligam’, I believe so that I may understand. In other words, spiritual truths aren’t penetrable from the outside in, but make sense only after you’ve made a leap of faith. The Holy Spirit is our bungee rope in the jump across the void.

We split into groups shortly before lunch. I found myself sitting outside in a circle, talking about spiritual gifts. About half my group claimed to be able to speak in tongues — one girl said she was taught the skill by her dad. Tongues are supposed to convey to God the things our heart wants to say, but which our brains can’t summon. It struck me that the things our brains can summon didn’t seem to be that well regarded on Alpha.

I spoke in tongues myself as a kid. I remember letting my tongue go loose and loll into disjointed syllables; English words unpicked at the seams and unmoored from any referential content. At the time, I truly believed this was a gift from God, as opposed to just a form of babbling.

More impressive were claims to physical healing. My group leader talked about his time in Africa, where he saw tremendous miracles: one man was healed from a bad back, another from cataracts, another (more prosaically) from hayfever.

“How can you explain this, if it’s not God?” they asked me, as the token dissenter. I replied that I couldn’t explain it on the basis of such limited information: I’d need firm evidence to be persuaded it even happened. But this was a God who refused to hem himself into laboratory conditions, laughing in the face of randomised controlled trials and arbitrarily messing with people’s pollen tolerance.

Lack of evidence wasn’t my only problem here. The weekend was touching upon one of my major bugbears with religion — the idea that there are certain, cloistered, truths that can’t be grasped through reason alone, but must be approached via some kind of mystical side street.

Here, I felt believers were playing a dangerous game. As soon as you remove rational thought from the equation, truth loses its accessibility and democracy. It becomes an article of power, with its self-appointed custodians free to shape its content as they see fit.

Or possibly, I was missing something. The group began to talk about the ‘fruits of the Spirit’: ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control’. Far more important than blitzing your allergies or helping you pray in made-up languages, these are things God promises to instill. Out here in the sunshine, in amongst these calm, kind people, my mind was churning. Despite myself I wanted to be like them.

After lunch, I went to the beach and strode purposefully along the pebbles for a good two hours. It was a beautiful day, and as the waves lapped around my feet, I considered whether my scepticism really might have its roots in sin.

Of course, the primary reason I wasn’t a Christian as because I didn’t think it was true. I found it logically hard to reconcile, and none of the answers I’d been given here had changed that. But my judgment in this regard was not clean, and pristine, and impartial; it was clouded by all kinds of personal predilections that gave their own tinge to the facts.

For example, I wasn’t a Christian because it clashed with my politics. I wasn’t a Christian because its worldview seemed unfair, because its anti-gay stance was a travesty, the rock music was an assault on my eardrums and the people were too clean-cut.

I wasn’t a Christian because I found the concept of a ‘father God’ infantilising, because I would lose social cachet and because trying to be good all the time, policing your thoughts, is a surefire means of messing yourself up.

I liked moaning, swearing, lusting, griping, gossiping, having sex before marriage and drunkenly rapping Eminem songs at karaoke. For me, being a Christian would remove the salt and the savour from life. I wasn’t a Christian because the devil gets all the best lines. I wasn’t a Christian because it hurt me the first time round.

What I actually was wasn’t obvious. My head said ‘militant atheist’, while my heart said something I couldn’t hear properly. Whatever the case, it occurred to me I’d taken the easy way out.

It was a chastening thought, and as I returned to the hall for the evening’s talk, I looked at those assembled with admiration. Presumably, they weren’t all naturally vanilla: for some of them, religion must have represented an awkward, if worthwhile, fit.

Tonight’s talk, said Gumbel, would take the form of a ‘Holy Spirit’ workshop. The idea was to put into practice everything we’d learnt. After all, you wouldn’t have a weekend learning about sport without the opportunity to play.

We were sitting in tightly packed rows, all 400 of us, lending a sense of intimacy that was lacking on Wednesday nights at HTB. I was exactly in the middle, directly opposite Gumbel, so when he looked forward it appeared he was staring right through me.

Every last one of us here tonight, he said, can be filled with the Holy Spirit. It doesn’t matter who we are, or how we got here — God loves us and wants to touch us. If we ask, we will receive. We simply need to lay aside our doubt, fear and sense of inadequacy and, however falteringly, trust in Him.

Was this mere emotionalism? That’s an argument often brought against Alpha, but Gumbel gave it short shrift. Emotion need not be a dirty word, he said, even for the British. If a comedian makes us laugh, or a film makes us cry, it’s seen as a rousing success. If you go to a football match, you’ll be shouting and chanting and leaping around in the time it takes to say ‘stiff upper lip’.

Nor should we fear the physical manifestations. Those are merely the outward trappings of something deeper, akin to the butterflies you feel when you’re in love. In this case, we could expect to cry, laugh, feel a surge of heat through our bodies or start to shake.

This struck me as a form of hypnosis: implanting an idea in people’s minds, to the extent that it becomes a reality. But Gumbel had pre-empted that one too.

“Once, after one of these weekends,” he said, “someone came up to me and said, ‘that’s autosuggestion — people are experiencing these things because you’ve told them that’s what’s going to happen’. Next time round I didn’t say a thing. Afterwards someone said, ‘all the heat and shaking, why didn’t you warn us about that?’”

Everyone laughed, as though it was funny, but now the room fell still. Now, said Gumbel, we must wait on the Holy Spirit. The real action was about to kick in.

First thing’s first, he said, we need to make a simple gesture. We should stand up with our hands out in front of us, a sign that indicates to ourselves and God we’re open to his touch.

Around the room, most people were following instructions: eyes shut in silent communion, hands cupped to catch a hail of blessings. The hush was eerie. Half participant and half voyeur, I wasn’t sure whether to copy them or take notes.

“Now we’re going to sing in tongues,” said Gumbel. “Feel free to join in if you’d like.”

His friend Jamie Haith, who’d led two talks, stepped into the breach. He was indeed singing in tongues, along with dozens of people around me, a jangle of softly splintered languages. The sound was lovely, if atonal, a sort of avant-garde vocal collective tuning up.

Right now, I didn’t know what to think. I was tired of fighting, like when you’re swimming against a current and start to succumb. “Can I pray for you?” asked the girl beside me, and I gave in.

“Alright then God, if it’s real, give me a sign,” I muttered. “I don’t believe, and I don’t think I want to believe, but I want to want to believe if it’s true.”

As she laid her hands on me, a blast of heat fired through my body, warming me from head to toe. I was blazing, and then trembling, my hands and feet shaking uncontrollably. At the front, someone was saying: “I’ve had a picture. I feel there’s someone here who has been using their intellect as a weapon against their group…”

Across the hall, people were coming to, swapping watery half-smiles. Some would cite tonight as one of the most powerful experiences of God they’d ever had. For me, the spell was broken. This didn’t seem like evidence for God so much as evidence for my own suggestibility — and that suggestibility didn’t seem to be diminished by my conscious disavowal of this stuff. What was that quote — ‘for those with faith, no evidence is necessary; for those without it, no evidence will suffice’…? I headed towards the bar and necked a drink.

Next morning, clustered on the beach as the tide came in, I recounted my tale to the group. It didn’t surprise them. They nodded sagely; it’s what God does, he comes in all his might to the most unlikely candidates and overwhelms them with his love. “I still don’t believe,” I told them. I think I might have mentioned Derren Brown. I don’t think they were especially impressed.

As we packed up our belongings and piled into the coach, the consensus was that it had been a wonderful weekend. We’d been lucky with the weather and with the food and with the fun times; the talent show was wonderful and the disco afterwards raucous; friendships had been cemented and we were spiritually recharged to boot.

But as the coach pulled up into South Kensington, just in time for the 5pm service at HTB, my own spiritual batteries were kaput.

I didn’t make it to the last few sessions of the Alpha Course. By this stage, I had a story to tell my colleagues — albeit not quite Watergate — and the final sessions (‘Why and how should I tell others?’ ‘Does God heal today?’) presupposed you’d cleared the first bar and had actually begun to believe in God. The course had mostly served to reinforce my existing issues with religion, and I remained convinced that most people associated with the Alpha Course were essentially nice but misguided. Further, that their misguidedness could be a source of genuine harm — as per every gay person who’s ever been forced to suppress their sexuality, every scared evangelist who thinks their friends are going to hell, and every science-oriented creationist who’s been forced to resort to doublethink.

It wasn’t for another few years that my fiery New Atheist fervour would start to burn itself out, leaving a more complicated landscape in its wake.