Well: are they converting or aren’t they? For several years now, a new spirituality has been spotted across Britain, a renaissance in Christian faith and influence. From Tom Holland’s widely read book Dominion, which argues that our liberal values are fundamentally Christian ones, to Richard Dawkins’s concession that even he, too, is a “cultural Christian”, the subject has become inescapable.
But last week, on 26 March, the Bible Society retracted its 2025 “Quiet Revival” report, which had sought to demonstrate a sustained rise in Christian identification, particularly among the young. The YouGov surveys on which it was based have been called into question, with various experts disputing whether the answers to an online survey are reflected in churchgoing or genuine conversions.
There are vested interests in both lines of argument. Humanists UK crowed over the retraction of the Bible Society’s report; revivalist talk is often accompanied by claims about a more traditionalist Generation Z, often from the political right. But what if there’s a different explanation for the anecdotal evidence of a spiritual renaissance? Something less blunt, or verifiable, than mass conversions, but a vaguer and less certain yearning?
All I can report is what I see at my local church in south-east London. Attendance among young adults has grown to the point that we launched an 18-26s ministry last year at their request. As one of the church leaders, I have seen this up close. In one Bible study session, held in a question-and-answer format, several participants asked for more of the difficult and challenging passages. There was no sense of hesitation or anxiety about what they might find. They simply wanted to understand what Christianity says about questions of evil and sexuality.
It is an openness I rarely encounter elsewhere. Many are trying to work out how faith might speak into the ordinary pressures of life: relationships, friendships, work. They are not, for the most part, looking to be affirmed. If anything, they seem weary of the language of “be yourself” and “live your truth”. Instead, there is a desire for something more demanding, a framework that offers moral clarity and places limits on the self.
What has caught me off guard is precisely this. The striking feature is not that they are coming, but what they are looking for: constraint, structure, and truth. And to understand this shift, it is worth looking at the intellectual climate that preceded it. In the 2000s, there was a quiet confidence in Britain that science and progress could account for most aspects of life. Religion was increasingly treated as residual, a private inheritance rather than a serious account of reality. Yet this vision rested on a partial account of human nature. It struggled to account for the enduring need for meaning, moral formation, and transcendence. The decline of traditional religious frameworks did not remove these impulses; it displaced them.
In this context, some of the moral and political movements of the past decade can be understood as attempts to reintroduce purpose, identity, and moral structure into a disenchanted landscape. Today, young people inhabit a world where truth is fragmented and identity unstable. This has produced a subtle shift in the questions being asked: from “Is this true?” to “How do I live?” The freedom to construct one’s own meaning has become, for many, a quiet burden.
Young people today are not primarily rebelling against religion, but against a sense of weightlessness. They are increasingly suspicious of endless affirmation, fatigued by moral relativism, and drawn instead to clarity, boundaries, and discipline. Christianity, in this context, is not encountered as restriction, but as a framework that offers grounding, a form of life that can sustain freedom. As a result, the emerging character of these young Christians is marked less by inherited tradition than by intentionality, a deliberate pursuit of a relationship with God. They are not institutional loyalists so much as seekers of rhythm, transcendence, and community.
They are a loose coalition: culturally varied, often urban, and defined less by background than by a shared search for meaning and structure. Some come from nominal Christian backgrounds, others from no religious upbringing. Some are children of immigrants, formed within moral worlds less shaped by Western secularism. What unites them is not inheritance, but a shared sense that something is missing.
Where this is most visible is not in abstract belief, but in gravitation towards traditions that make the sacred tangible. Catholicism and Pentecostalism, in different ways, offer this, in the form of an embodiment, and encounter. What draws people is not the intellectual proof of Christianity, but the possibility that it can be lived. This generation appears less rigidly materialist, more open to spiritual reality, and increasingly disillusioned with purely scientific accounts of meaning. But this is not belief, at least not yet. It is better understood as the removal of disbelief, a reopening of the question.
In such conditions, Christianity has become conceivable again and is no longer socially absurd. The question is no longer “How could anyone believe this?” but “What if this is true?” This renewed openness is becoming visible in the public square. Expressions of Christian faith are appearing more openly in mainstream culture, from music to sport. Gospel artists are finding wider audiences, and public figures are speaking more candidly about baptism, prayer, and personal faith. These are not dominant trends, but they are notable.
The shape of British Christianity today is diverse and increasingly decentralised. There are signs of a Catholic resurgence, driven in part by renewed interest in liturgy and tradition. At the same time, charismatic forms of worship, emphasising encounter and the presence of the transcendent, continue to exert strong influence. Alongside this sits a growing immigrant church presence, often evangelical in character, marked by a conviction that the gospel is not a private affair but something to be lived publicly.
Christianity in Britain is no longer simply inherited; it is increasingly chosen, less nominal and more demanding. The energy is not revivalist fervour, but quiet seriousness. It is a generation approaching faith as a deliberate way of life. It is important to acknowledge that the visible growth in young Christians does not amount to a mass revival. It remains fragile and uneven. There are clear risks: shallow engagement, a form of Christianity shaped more by aesthetics than conviction, and the continuing institutional weaknesses of many churches. Whether this openness matures into sustained belief remains an open question.
Britain is not returning to Christendom, but the certainties of secularism have weakened. What has been revealed is a persistent human longing for meaning, purpose, and direction, something procedural politics cannot provide. Christianity offers not just beliefs, but a way of life that speaks to these desires, helping to explain its renewed appeal among some young people. The story of belief in Britain is no longer one of steady decline, but of unexpected reconsideration. British society is beginning, however tentatively, to ask again what it once thought it had outgrown.
[Further reading: Can Sarah Mullally heal a divided Church?]
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Subscribe here to commentThe biggest danger in the movement that stresses a personal relationship with God is that it individualises responsibility,for systemic and familial suffering and guilt which in to a degree that reflects an already highly individualised secular culture that seeks to do the same.
For many,in an already fraught internal space of learned shame,inadequacy,and,often as a result, sometimes a very real culpability and stigma, faith as mediated by theology, doesn’t necessarily lead to an experience of transcendence, self-forgiveness, or forgiveness of others. That’s beacause theolgy does not of itself, offer an understanding of the social, familial and cultural origins of the path on which beleeivers have travelled far less that of human nature, motivation, history or utimately, psycholgy itself. Nor does it emphasis the moral insights of Christianity being rooted in both a univerality of experience, and the necessity of maintaining a balance of tension between self and other, inner and outer realities…. a recognition and respect for the difference and interdependence between the two,
On the contrary, the theological overlay; the literal and external notions of God and the Devil ,the concept of original sin and the blood debt of Jesus combine to coerce belief on a altar of fear, and paradoxically lead to projection of that which is internal due to the untenable nature of personal guilt it engenders. The results of this are all too readily seen in a private lack of self worth and agency on one hand alternating with a public sense of sole and unquestionable ownership of God, the truth and the rightness of all that one does and one thinks. The primacy of emotionalism over intellect and rationality rather than an integration of the two. The addiction to tribal identity and group psycholgical uplift through shaed mantras and doctrines over self reflection and an appreciation of self sameness accross doctrinal divides. In fact it’s hard to understand the current social, economic and geopolitical tensions and their chief protagonists at play in anything but such terms.
Others will argue that if latter day Evangelical Christianity leads people to a different path.of belonging, self acceptance, and fruitful productive lives in the community, then it scarcely matters. I would say that even in this setting a positive message of Christ will filter through, when as is often the case,a real interventionist, community orientated spirit is cultivated. It is here perhaps that the balance of individual and group ethos can prevent one outstripping the other.. Apart from that ,in a wider sense of relations between people of diverse backgrounds it very much does matter.
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It’s fine to report experience of a thriving church in London, the most religious region of the UK (except NI). But this statement is deeply misleading:
QUOTE: the Bible Society retracted its 2025 “Quiet Revival” report, which had sought to demonstrate a sustained rise in Christian identification, particularly among the young. The YouGov surveys on which it was based have been called into question, with various experts disputing whether the answers to an online survey are reflected in churchgoing or genuine conversions. UNQUOTE
In fact the Bible Society report did not say anything very different from others in terms of “Christian IDENTIFICATION”. It’s big, widely reported claim – and the basis for the “revival” wording – was that there had been a 50% increase in churchgoing PRACTICE between 2018 and 2024, especially among the young.
It continued to make that claim despite the fact that data from both the Anglican and Catholic churches showed a DECLINE over the same period, and despite some of the country’s most distinguished statisticians pointing out that the underlying data must be flawed. And so it turned out. The YouGov survey data has not simply been “called into question”. It has been withdrawn by YouGov as unreliable. The reason was a failure of YouGov controls to prevent people “opting-in” to surveys in order to get a reward, with no incentive to give truthful answers, or even to be in the UK. There is now no dispute about whether the data is valid. It is not.
According to both the gold standard British Social Attitudes Survey, which uses random sampling, churchgoing, including among the young, has declined. The story is as expected from the Anglican and Catholic Church attendance data.
Of course, some individual churches, like this one in Lewisham, do indeed report increases, and there has been a rise in adult baptisms. But those increases are overwhelmed by declines elsewhere.
While Christianity, in its many forms, is going to play a significant role in national life for the foreseeable future, let’s not let confirmation bias get in the way of the objectivity.