Is there really a resurgence in Christianity? Nick Spencer interrogates recent claims before asking why young people are turning to religion. 13/05/2025

Archaeologists have a saying. “One stone is a stone. Two stones make a feature. Three stones make a wall. Four stones is a building. Five stones is a palace.” It’s a maxim worth bearing in mind when we encounter surveys that claim to detect signs of religious revival.

The painful truth is that if there had been a revival every time over–enthusiastic believers had found signs of one in the polling data, we would be living in the New Jerusalem. It’s not so much “one stone is a stone” as “one stone is a sign that ‘God is on the move’, and two stones, however small, is a bona fide revival, praise be.” Having perused these data for nearly thirty years, I have become tired of, and a little cynical about, such claims.And yet, recent trends have caused even an exhausted sceptic like me to take note.

Earlier this year, The Times reported a survey which found that members of Gen Z were less likely to identify as atheists than their middle–aged parents, and more likely to consider themselves spiritual. This had an impressively large sample size (10,000) but I have not been able to track the data down, so it’s hard to interrogate the results. The fact that it was published to promote a book about “post–atheism” doesn’t add to one’s confidence. Moreover, the word “spiritual” leaves me a bit cold, as the character of Will captured in the Inbetweeners 2 movie. Be all that as it may, this is still a stone.

There are others. YouGov’s bi-annual tracker has been picking up unusual trends about belief in God among younger Britons since 2021. The proportion of 18–24s claiming such belief was 16% in August 2021 but then started climbing to 19% a year later, 34% a year after that, 39% by August 2024, before reaching an astonishing 45% in January this year. The next youngest age group (25–49) showed a much more modest, but still notable increase, over the same period, from 21% in August 2021 to 33% in January 2025. A feature?

Then there is America. Religiously very different, of course, but an interesting comparison in as far as that famously and (by Western standards) anomalously Christian nation has seen its religious adherence sliding slowly (and among younger people quite rapidly) over the last 20 years. Recent research by Barna found a 12–point rise in the percentage of US adults who say they “have made a personal commitment to Jesus that is still important in their life today”, rising from 54% in 2021 to 66% today. This has been driven, again, by younger people, with Gen Z men showing an increase in 15 percentage points between 2019 and 2025, and Millennial men one of 19 percentage points. (Generation X – my generation: sorry folks – showed no real change.) A wall?

And then, last month, back in the UK, the much–reported Bible Society/ YouGov study The Quiet Revival, replete with an enormous sample size of 13,000 respondents, found that young people, and especially young men, were showing unprecedented interest in Christianity. This reported that whereas, in 2018, just 4% of 18–24–year–olds said they attended church at least monthly, today this has risen to 16% (!) with young men increasing from 4% to 21% (!!) Given that two of the iron laws of the sociology of religion are that (in societies like ours) older people are more religious than younger, and women are more religious than men, this is a huge shift. A building?

If these surveys look a bit like building, or at least a wall, it is one that is buttressed by innumerable anecdotes, along the lines of (in the words of one vicar to me) “young man wandered into my church after the service today with the words, ‘I want to become religious.’” This isn’t happening everywhere, and we must always remember that the plural of anecdote isn’t data. Still, anecdotes are often worth retelling.

We shouldn’t run away with ourselves here. Anyone with a genuine (as opposed to polemical) interest in the future of religious belief should be alert to data blips, even ones as outsize and persistent at this, and pollsters would do well to track this apparent phenomenon forensically over coming years. But if this is a feature or a wall or something more substantial, it’d be good to know why it’s emerging now.

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The blunt truth is that we just don’t know. Data will detect trends and anecdotes offer stories, but neither is much good at explaining social trends of this nature. In the absence of harder research (we at Theos are embarking on some of that soon), here are ten hypotheses that could explain this peculiar phenomenon. Some may be spurious, and none is sufficient, but I think that some combination might help enlighten something of what is going on.

One: geopolitics. The world today is in poor shape, instability, inequality, anxiety and violence stalking the land. The persistent, subterranean and seemingly ineradicable, popularity of Paleyian natural theology – the idea that you can read the existence and character of God from looking at nature – often leads people to imagine that belief is the result of some kind of proof about the goodness and order of creation. Just look at the beauty and wonder and harmony of things: how can you not believe in God? In reality, the opposite is closer to the truth. Whereas belief in a slightly anaemic, deistic First Cause God may be generated by such arguments, faith in the personal God of the Abrahamic religions is often catalysed by the sense that things don’t add up, that something is wrong, that we need more. In the twenty years after the end of the Cold War, even those who didn’t think history had actually ended were conscious of the rosy prospects for peace and prosperity. Boom and bust had ended. Democracy was spreading. Human rights were being observed. Human beings were running the show, and running it pretty well thank you. At times like this, it’s easy to believe, to paraphrase Barack Obama, that there’s nothing wrong with the human condition that we can’t fix ourselves. In such circumstances, who needs a different story? Who needs God? It is when our efforts at building heaven on earth crumble, that we search around for other possibilities. And they feel like they are crumbling furiously right now. In short, the wider context has left us more open to new perspectives, new approaches, new narratives about the way things are. Some of these might include God.

Two: social disenfranchisement. This has hit younger people particularly hard. Gen Z cannot expect a higher standard of living than their parents, as their own parents once did. Indeed, they might be wise to expect a lower one. Saddled with debt by their early 20s, uncertain about long–term work prospects, condemned to wages that are unlikely to enable them to afford a house any time soon, with all the knock–on effects this has on marriage, family and stability, there is a palpable sense among this generation of being economically and socially disenfranchised. And once again, if this earthly kingdom seems not to have a place for you, you might just be more open to others that do.

Three: masculinity. This trend has hit young men especially. The (entirely proper and still incomplete) re–balancing of gender roles in work and home, and the fresh attention paid to casual sexism across society has had a shadow side to it, in which the role, value and purpose of men and of masculinity have been brought into question. Sometimes the rhetoric has slipped from some men being a problem to men being the problem. The demise of heavy industry and many manual jobs has sped this trend. Ditto the relentless emphasis on book learnin’ at the expense of trades and crafts. The absence of fathers has not helped. Cumulatively, young men have faced existential problems their own fathers did not. It’s the phenomenon that Andrew Tate and fellow misogynists have exploited, and it’s a phenomenon that, more positively, might be driving young men to explore religion as an alternative, affirming narrative of who they are, and what their role, responsibilities and contribution to a wider good might be.

Four: immigration. Immigrants are almost always more religious than British–born people. Accordingly, the sheer number of immigrants to Britain over the last ten years will have added raw numbers to revival data. Analysing the curious findings of the 2022 World Values Survey (which showed that Gen Z are most likely to say they have no religion, but also the most likely to say they believe in Hell), David Young, a Research Associate at the Political Psychology Lab of the University of Cambridge, concluded that “the pattern we see in Gen Z emerges not because of changes in the combinations of beliefs held by Britons, but changes in the composition of who Britons are… while most of Gen Z have no religion, they are the generation with the largest Muslim minority.” This is undoubtedly true, but the other surveys quoted above suggest there is more going on than is explain by this hypothesis alone. After all, many migrants come from Christian and Hindu cultures, the revival data pertains to Christianity, and the Bible Society research is clear that “the growth in churchgoing among young people is seen at scale among young White people [and] while these could all be migrants, at the scale we’re seeing it seems highly unlikely.” More likely, is the idea that the mere presence of believing immigrants in UK society has pushed the visibility and prominence of religion up the agenda for many people (see point 5).

Five: Islam. If some of the increase in religiosity in Britain is down to higher number of practising Muslims, many of whom are young, so, paradoxically, may be in the increase in Christianity. The presence of a confident, coherent religious creed and culture, heretofore largely alien and unfamiliar, catalyses a degree of soul–searching, and forces the question about what exactly I do believe and why. Gone (or at least going) are the days when Britons can simply assume a kind of Christianity–and–water as the default religio–cultural position of one another and indeed of themselves. Aged about 10, in the early 1980s, I can remember sitting next to my mum while she was filling in a form. There was a box that asked you to enter your religion. I asked her what we should put there. “Church of England”, she said. “But we don’t go to church”, I replied with admirable rigour in one so young. “No, don’t worry,” she reassured me, “everyone puts that.” Those days are gone. Existential questions are now harder to avoid. And the more we ask them, the more we find ourselves arriving at answers we didn’t expect.

Six: the world on–line. This arguably influences the story in two ways, one positive, the other not. Many young adults are now able to dip their toe in religious waters from the comfort of their own phone. Back in the day, when someone of my generation was pondering and wondering, we slipped into a service after it had started, sat at the back, and prayed no one came to talk to us. Now, an explorer can do all that before even appearing ‘at church door’ looking for the next stage of acceptance, belonging, and community. In this regard, the world on–line can smooth the path IRL. Less positively, there is surely no co–incidence between the rise in religiosity in the generation that has been immersed in smart phones and social media since their early years. This is the group that has been christened “the anxious generation” by Jonathan Haidt, and which suffers from exceptionally high levels of reported mental ill–health. Toxic childhood and a poisonous on–line environment have left many young people looking for relationships that are genuine, not mediated by a screen and not weaponised for marketing purposes and Silicon Valley profits. There are plenty of places to find this (society is not as chronically on–line as all that). One of them is church.

Seven: public figures/ social influencers. These come in (some very) different flavours, from Bukayo Saka and Chris Pratt, through Stormzy and Jordan Peterson, all the way to Russell Brand and a whole host of Instagram stars of whom someone like me will be blissfully ignorant. Whatever else these figures may be – and in Brand’s case that is for the courts to decide – each is a phenomenon. They have enormous followings, and they talk frequently and positively, albeit in very different ways, about Christianity and the Bible. They reach parts – younger and more male parts, so to speak – that youth evangelists can only dream of. Like them or not, they may well be factor in this new trend.

Eight: pandemic. Distinct as it may seem, this is really a variation of the negative social media point. Again, it hardly seems an accident that all this is happening in the wake of the first pandemic in a century. Covid hit different people in different ways, so it is particularly hard to generalise, but some of the better–known consequences – an enforced time in which lives–as–usual were suspended, in which a period of reflection and re–evaluation was forced upon people, in which people were disembedded from the routines and relationships that make up their normal life and well–being – all of these are liable to have had some kind of effect on people’s attitude to the meaning and purpose of existence.

Nine: rebellion. When Theos was started, twenty years ago, it was the height of sophistication to tell believers that they had been brainwashed/ were virus carriers/ believed in sky pixies/ lived by a code of Bronze Age ethics/ were a mortal threat to civilisation/ etc. Those were the days, my friend. But they did end, and just as every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction, so do social rebellions. What could be more edgy than telling your contentedly atheistic parents that you have decided to be baptised? (Mine weren’t exactly over the moon). This could make it sound as if rebellion were mere rebellion, however, and although that may be so among some, there’s also (potential) content to any reaction here. The message of the famous atheist bus campaign – “stop worrying and enjoy your life” – was toe–curling at the time, and it hasn’t matured with age. Concerned about Putin, Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Trump, climate change, trade wars, inflation, the far right, cybercrime, terrorism, the slow erosion of democracy, conflict between nuclear armed India and Pakistan? Well don’t be! Just stop worrying and enjoy your life!!! The age in which all you needed to do was see Ricky Gervais drape a microphone stand across his shoulders as if it were the beam of a cross, with the word ATHEIST scrawled over his chest, or get Stephen Fry to narrate a cartoon about how fundamentally decent human beings really are deep down, seems like ancient history. And that kind of Celebrity Humanism (as opposed to the more profound kind of humanism that is emerging today) feels painfully empty and incapable of grappling with the world we actually live in.

Finally, my generation. I joked earlier about how, whatever kind of trend this was, it wasn’t showing up in the data for Generation X. We’re pretty much beyond hope now. Joking aside, there may be something in the fact that the younger we go, the more likely we are to find generations who have grown up without any religious baggage. We Gen Xers thought we knew what religion was (oppressive sexual moralising, boring church services, meaningless dogma, etc.) and so we thought we knew what it was we were rejecting. People born after 2000 don’t even know that. They have not, so to speak, been inoculated against it. Of all the things we Gen X’s can be accused of bestowing upon our children – debt, a weakened welfare state, global insecurity, climate chaos – at least religious baggage isn’t one of them.

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So, there we go. To repeat: none of the ten reasons outline here is watertight let alone sufficient. Some may turn out to be illusory. Indeed, returning to my warning earlier on, this whole ‘phenomenon’ may turn out to be illusory. At the moment, however, the data seem to indicate that we’ve unearthed a feature that might just turn into something more substantial. If so, we owe it to ourselves to study this phenomenon with care and, in as far as we can, dispassionately.

A shorter version of this article was published in the Church Times. Read it here.

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