Last year, the Bible Society published a report with a striking claim: the number of young people attending church in England and Wales had quadrupled in just six years. In 2018, just 4% of 18-24 year olds surveyed said they were Christian and attended church at least monthly. By 2024, that figure had risen to 16%. The researchers called it a "Quiet Revival."
Press coverage was extensive. The findings were raised in Parliament in the UK. Churches all around the anglosphere pointed to the numbers as confirmation of their dearest hopes - that young people were turning back to faith. There was skepticism too, and questions about its methodology, as the findings seemed wildly out of step with every other available measure - the long-running British Social Attitudes Survey, the Church of England's own figures, decades of consistent data pointing in the opposite direction.
This week, the report was finally retracted. YouGov, which conducted the research, confirmed that an internal review had found that the data had been skewed by fraudulent respondents (people who had signed up to the online survey purely to claim the cash rewards on offer and not given genuine answers). Quality control measures designed to catch this problem had not been properly applied.
Generally, you'd think that a profound change like a figure quadrupling in just six years would attract some scrutiny - and probably flag a potential mistake. But this story gained traction because something about it felt true to many people before anyone checked the numbers. There is observable interest among some young people in traditional and religious lifestyles and attitudes. There's a reactionary desire to "RETVRN" to some nostalgic vision of the past, often paired with Roman Catholic aesthetics. I've blogged before on the growth of patriarchal thinking among Gen Z men, but it's not just men. There's the "tradwife" trend, in which women perform and celebrate a return to domestic submissiveness, which has attracted mainstream coverage. It makes sense that this might translate to growth in church attendance, doesn't it?
Well, no. This "quiet revival" was quiet because it wasn't happening. Maybe some young people are attracted to the aesthetic of certain expressions of Christianity: the sense of traditionalism, the way Christianity is often encountered today as a political identity before a religious one. It's hard to tell how much of this social change is real and how much is inflated by the distorted reflection of social media, where outrageous content flourishes, where highly engaged minorities get overrepresented, bots flood comment sections, and people hide behind anonymity to experiment with ideas that don't actually match their lived reality. But if there really is something significant and tangible happening, there's not yet any evidence that it comes from church. There's a significant difference between symbolic affiliation (larping online about the idea of tradition, hierarchy, order, and ritual) and embodied practice (giving up some of your Sunday and possibly other things to attend gatherings, accepting obligations to serve others, etc). What are people really hungry for when they reach for the signifiers of tradition without the substance?
Here is what I think is true. Individualism has been the dominant ideology of our time, and it creates isolation. Online communities do not fill that gap, whatever they promise. People are lonely in ways that are making them unwell, and making them susceptible to whoever offers the most compelling account of why. Churches, and other traditional institutions have been in decline. In some cases, that decline is a reckoning they brought on themselves, through the abuse of the power people entrusted to them - and I don't say that from a distance. I still find myself believing that institutional belonging is a salve for modern loneliness. At some point you have to show up somewhere, in person, among people you did not choose, and learn to be part of something larger than yourself.
Sometimes a retraction comes too late. People have already had their biases confirmed. To reach for an infamous example, when Wakefield's fraudulent article linking MMR vaccines and autism was retracted 12 years later, it wasn't enough to extinguish the anti-vax movement's convictions. The claims had already been naturalised by a movement that is not evidence-based anyway, and was always bigger than that one article.
In this much smaller case, I'm not sure "Christian Gen Z" had soaked into cultural assumptions just yet. But it's worth thinking about the culture it's speaking into, because it resonated for a reason.
I wasn't surprised when the Bible Society retracted their report on booming church attendance among youth and young adults, but it still made for some Sunday afternoon thoughts.
— Hannah Shelley, MLIS (Metadata, Lattes & Impostor Syndrome) (@hannahshelley.site) March 29, 2026 at 6:59 PM
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