In April 2025, the Bible Society released The Quiet Revival, an online report detailing the results of two YouGov surveys commissioned by the charity in 2018 and 2024 to measure attitudes of adults in England and Wales toward Christianity and the Bible. According to the report, in the preceding six years, church attendance had grown by more than 2 million people and the number of self-described Christians increased by 56%.
Young adults, The Quiet Revival claimed, were more excited and actively engaged in their faith than many older generations. These findings contradicted a Pew Research survey that showed a 13% drop in the number of Christians in the UK between 2010 and 2020 (from 62% to 49%).
Was the “quiet revival” so quiet it went unnoticed by other demographers?
The Bible Society is a 200-year-old nonprofit dedicated to making the Bible accessible and helping readers apply it to their own lives. So, when a survey commissioned by the Bible Society yields results that confirm the organization’s own goals and biases, those results are bound to raises suspicions.
Methodology
From the outset, polling professionals had concerns about the methodology behind The Quiet Revival report. Central to these is the research platform YouGov, which uses active sampling, also known as opt-in polling, to conduct its surveys. Rather than select a random sample, YouGov chooses respondents from its registered panel of 29 million users to answer specific surveys. The responses are then statistically weighted to mirror the demographics of the national profile of the UK.
On the surface, such a large pool of potential participants allows organizations like the Bible Society to conduct surveys with impressive response numbers of 19,101 (2018) and 13,146 (2024) adults. However, YouGov’s registered panel members, recruited from advertisements and websites, are “paid” 50 to 100 points for every survey they answer. Points are then redeemable for prizes. A £50 gift card costs 5,000 points, so critics are concerned panelists might be motivated to complete a high volume of surveys with little regard for accuracy in order to accumulate points.
Other Christian organizations who’ve used opt-in surveys like those conducted by YouGov have seen similar pro-Christian results. In the UK, Tearfund, the Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer project and the Institute for the Impact of Faith in Life all reported proof of religious growth among young adults. Barna Group in the U.S. relied on opt-in survey data for its pronouncement that Gen Z and Millennials are the “most engaged” generations. However, Pew Research Center’s surveys showed no evidence of young adult revival in either country.
Other research by Pew revealed when it comes to opt-in surveys, the responses given by young adults often are unreliable. An online opt-in survey reporting high rates of Holocaust denial among young adults returned drastically different results when the questions were sent through the mail to a randomized sample of participants. Young adult responders to online opt-in surveys are more likely to answer “Yes” when asked a Yes/No question, which is why one Canadian study caught 12% of young panelists claiming they were qualified to pilot a nuclear submarine.
By contrast, randomized studies survey participants who are randomly selected by the researchers.
“The gold standard in social science research is surveys that use random samples of the population,” said Conrad Hackett, demographer of religion at Pew Research Center. “You can’t volunteer (opt in). You have to be chosen randomly on the basis of your telephone number or home address.”
Other research sees a different story
The Labor Force Survey is one such study that samples 20,000 households at random to measure religious self-identification in the UK. Last summer, the LFS reported a drop in Christian identification from 37% in 2018 to 28% in 2025 among 18- to 34-year-olds.
Another randomized survey is the British Social Attitudes Survey, which measures worship attendance in addition to religious identity. Conducted by Humanists UK, the BSA randomly samples 3,000 adults online and via telephone. The results of this survey also show a decline in church attendance for young people, including Gen Z.
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Having studied the data, John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, concluded the results of the BSA survey “do not replicate the Bible Society’s finding that there has been a revival of Christianity in Britain.”
The Bible Society’s senior research and impact manager, Rob Barward-Symmons, isn’t concerned about the discrepancy between his own survey and the BSA. He’s more interested in the story rather than statistics. “That is the nature of data collection. There is no single perfect source. … For me, I’m more confident than I was in the overall story.”
Another opt-in YouGov survey, the British Election Study, showed a decline in the number of churchgoers in England and Wales from 8% in 2015 to 6.6% in 2024, whereas the Bible Society’s survey showed an increase from 8% to 12% between 2018 and 2024. The Bible Society is quick to point out that the BES is a political survey rather than a religious one and so is weighted differently on YouGov. The YouGov Christian identity figure (33%) is lower than that of the Census (46%) leading to an undercount of churchgoers, especially those from minority communities. Church attendance is higher among young people from ethnic minorities, which might explain why this number was missed by the BES, according to the Bible Society.
However, not only did The Quiet Revival report not match randomized surveys, it also conflicted with attendance counts from the major Christian denominations in the UK.
“I do not doubt that the Bible Society acted in good faith, but they haven’t engaged with the mountain of evidence, some of it very recent, pointing to religious decline,” said David Voas, emeritus professor of social science at University College London. “While churchgoing continues to rebound from the lows of the COVID lockdown, attendance at worship services remains substantially lower than it was in 2019, before the pandemic.”
The Bible Society also claimed Catholicism had risen by 56%, from 3.7 million to 5.8 million.
“We know from the Catholic church itself, however, that the reality is far different. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales counted 701,902 people attending Sunday mass in 2019. In 2023, there were 554,913 — a drop of 21%,” Voas said.
The Bible Society counters this criticism by arguing denominational numbers may not account for attendance at online churches, universities or cathedrals. Denominations also differ in how they count church attendance and whether they include midweek events, school assemblies and family activities. Another complicating factor is church identity versus attendance in the Bible Society’s survey, which asks panelists what denomination or group they “most closely identify with.” In the UK a person may identify as Anglican but attend an independent evangelical church.
Mark Hart, rector at St Mary’s, Nantwich, and a mathematician by training, has done some number crunching of his own. Hart transposed the data from The Quiet Revival regarding church attendance by 18- to 24-year-olds onto his local parish. He calculated that if the survey numbers were correct, he would see 180 young adults worshipping at St. Mary’s once a month.
“It would be wonderful if true, but it’s out by a long way, and we’re not unusual. It may be argued that this high attendance is concentrated in certain areas, but it would need to be even higher there to give the same average,” he said.
Hart’s experience mirrors the Statistics for Mission figures, compiled by Anglican statistician Ken Eames, showing church attendance and participation was significantly lower in 2024 than in 2018. The Quiet Revival had reported a 25% increase in attendance for the Church of England over that same period.
The Baptist Union of Great Britain reports growth in 57% of its churches between 2022 and 2024. They say the 18- to 35-year-old demographic has grown by 16%.
Standing by their story
Even with emerging criticism, the original Bible Society report continues to circulate in the media, and it remains on the Bible Society website. Some information about the conflicting surveys is available under the FAQ section for The Quiet Revival. Yet the report’s assertion of increased interest in Christianity has real-world consequences.
A community in Etling Grange in rural Norfolk paused building plans to consider if their church hall renovation would be sufficient for all the “newly enlivened people” who might be coming as a result of England’s quiet revival. Humanists UK Director of Human Rights and Advocacy Richy Thompson, who sees no statistical evidence of such a revival, says: “The Quiet Revival report has continued to generate excited chatter and misleading discourse. The Bible Society was very headstrong in its report, declaring that ‘the church is in a period of rapid growth’ and that this ‘reality can no longer be denied.’ That’s clearly wrong. The Bible Society should retract its claims.”
Barward-Symmons, however, remains confident in the data from The Quiet Revival, which he says “points to both increased engagement with Christianity and a changing spiritual atmosphere.” Because the numbers are admittedly “on the upper end of a range,” Barward-Symmons says the team at the Bible Society asked YouGov to run additional checks on the data to look for disproportionate dropout from nonchurchgoers and response bias. YouGov found neither of these to be the case, nor was there a methodological error, according to their internal examination.
“This strongly suggests we are observing a genuine change,” said Barward-Symmons.
In Hackett’s view, the circumstances are more nuanced. “There are pockets of Christian growth in Britain. However, the overall trend seems to be ongoing decline in the share of the population who are churchgoing Christians.”
Since the release of The Quiet Revival, individuals and churches have testified to new church plants, families joining small parishes and young men showing up to worship inspired by TikTok influencers.
“We called it a quiet revival because, even at the numbers that we’re reporting, this is not a flood,” said Rhiannon McAleer, director of research and impact at Bible Society. “This could be, you know, five new people over a few years coming through the threshold.”
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