A few months ago, the Bible Society released a new report on Christianity in England and Wales. Titled The Quiet Revival, its reception has been anything but, and for good reason. After decades of relentless decline, any sign of genuine upturn in religious fortunes—especially for the ecclesial (former) big beasts of Anglicanism, Catholicism, or Methodism—would be something worth shouting about. It would also go firmly against the assumptions, expectations, and hopes of a large segment of society.
The report is worth reading in full, but the general takeaway is that recent years have witnessed a definite “change in the spiritual weather.” (How’s that for a charmingly British turn of phrase?) While this has been in the air for a while, there is now irrefutable proof—or so the Bible Society claims—that “the Church is in a period of rapid growth, driven by young adults and in particular young men.” More specifically, they estimate that the number of adults who are “churchgoing Christians” (defined as ticking a Christian box, and saying they go to church at least once a month) has surged “from 3.7m in 2018 to 5.8m in 2024—an increase of 56%.” In the same period, monthly churchgoing has quadrupled among those aged eighteen to twenty-four from 4 percent to 16 percent. Catholics and Pentecostals are the biggest beneficiaries; the two Anglican Churches—the Church of England and the Church in Wales (where prepositions matter nearly as much as pronouns)—markedly less so.
Before addressing the more specific, startling claims, the general assessment is reasonably plausible. Howsoever one defines it—and “spiritual weather” is as good a metaphor as any other—it really does feel like something is afoot within British socio-religious culture. I suspect that, because of society’s “herd immunity”—built up over decades from a steady drip of dead strains of Christianity preventing most people from ever contracting a live one—it is once again possible to encounter the gospel as something new and exciting.
Depending on who you ask, Britain has been secularizing in earnest for anywhere between sixty and five hundred years. It is not unreasonable to suppose there must come a point when all the secularizing has more or less happened. It is also not a stretch to think Britain’s young adults especially have been raised in a climate of what one might call Peak Secularization. If so, then the only way is up. A new generation of cultural and intellectual rebels, mavericks, and contrarians might perhaps discover something in Christianity that their grandparents or great-grandparents overlooked.
American readers, for whom the word “revival” conjures up Cane Ridge, Azusa Street, or the recent goings-on in Asbury, might reasonably feel underwhelmed. Instead, we’re talking “revival” in the sense of a gradual, still-drowsy period of waking up.
The evidence we’re seeing has so far been subtle. In Catholicism, for example, many Catholic churches are reporting larger cohorts of converts than in recent years. Typical Sunday Mass attendance has started growing again, albeit from a very low post-Covid ebb, for the first time since the mid-sixties. Some of this is certainly due to immigration—though there was plenty of that during the decades of decline too.
The people who are left in the Church at the tail-end of decades of decline have to be there for a reason. And the people they meet there are there for a reason too. In the right circumstances, this can create a dynamic of mutual reinforcement and encouragement—a kind of “creative minority” effect, to borrow a phrase from Pope Benedict (who borrowed it from Arnold Toynbee). They’re the kinds of groups that start attracting others.
Trouble is, even for someone half-persuaded by the basic idea behind The Quiet Revival, the sheer scale of the effect the Bible Society claim to have uncovered is very hard to believe.
An extra 2.1 million churchgoers since 2018? Even if they’re all only once-a-monthers, that should still be an extra half-million packing the pews each week. Yet in both the Catholic Church and Church of England, actual church attendance is lower than what it was back then, thanks to the big Covid clear-out. How many Pentecostal churches there are is anyone’s guess; I’ve seen estimates ranging from four thousand to seventeen thousand. Maybe that’s where all these newly converted young men are hiding, though I’d be surprised.
The stats about men don’t quite ring true, either. I’m perfectly able to imagine young British men being keen on church and know a fair few myself. That there’s a particular segment of them who have recently come—or come back—to some kind of committed faith is also plausible enough. (And not just young men, either. This past weekend, I had a long conversation with a seventy-five-year-old, returning to church for the first time in decades.) What I can’t quite credit is that there are suddenly five times more of them than there were just six years ago, or that they now outnumber religious-practicing young women. At Friday prayers, maybe. Sunday Eucharist, I doubt it.
The Bible Society is, to be fair, on firmer ground on two issues. Firstly: the ethnic diversity of church congregations. As in the U.S., the churches are very serious net beneficiaries of immigration. Secondly: the relative strength of Catholicism and Pentecostalism. True, nationwide there are many Anglican churches that are thriving too. But the report’s basic claim that “among 18–34s, only 20% of churchgoers are Anglican (down from 30% in 2018), with 41% Catholic and 18% Pentecostal,” certainly feels like it could be true. Two weeks ago, in the small town where I live, there were many times more eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds (several with children of their own) cramming just the “overflow” porch area at the back of Mass than there were in the whole Anglican “café church” service across the road.
Often, when a piece of religious research attracts media attention for its eye-popping stats, it’s fairly easy to see what—or who—has gone wrong. This time around, however, it’s not so easy.
I had no part in the current survey, but I’ve met some of the team at the Bible Society, including the report’s co-authors. They’re excellent, rigorous scholars. Both surveys, in 2018 and 2024, were fielded by a highly respected polling company, YouGov.
Small (sub)sample sizes, and resulting margins of error, are often behind inflated findings. But that can’t be the issue here, either. The 2024 survey had a sample size of over nine thousand, which is very high for this kind of social survey and will have cost a pretty penny. (The General Social Survey, American sociology’s gold standard, includes about three thousand in each wave to “nationally represent” an adult population roughly five times the size of England and Wales’s.)
So far as I can see, the Bible Society have done everything properly, and ought to have every right to be bullish about their methodology, and thus the reliability of the results they’ve drawn from it.
Nevertheless, something, somewhere, appears to have gone awry. I’ve not been privy to the full methodology and findings (though a somewhat fuller version is available on YouGov’s website), so I can’t say for sure. My guess would be an issue with the underlying sampling—that is, on how the survey participants were recruited in the first place. Polling companies don’t just dial numbers at random anymore. They collect background information from large pools of willing survey-doers, and then send surveys out to the right mix of people to meet the various quotas. To be sure, there are good reasons why they do this. But for these and other reasons, the reassuring words “nationally representative,” which I’ve used myself many times, don’t necessarily mean what you might hope they mean.
Essentially, I think that The Quiet Revival has identified something real. But some methodological gremlin has amplified it well beyond the bounds of believability.
