The Rise and Fall of the Quiet Revival

Throughout 2022 and 2023, I was writing a book about the God question. Sadly, I fell out with the publisher, and I’ve been too sour to do anything with it yet, but an important premise of the book was that we live in a time of apatheism. Most people aren’t religious or atheistic — they just don’t care.

So, I was surprised when I heard rumblings about the “Quiet Revival”. More and more people, I read, were turning to faith. God was back on the menu, brothers.

I was sceptical. Firstly, this very much contradicted my book, so I had a wholly selfish reason not to believe it. Tell a man who has written a book predicting the apocalypse that humanity is saved and he will grind his teeth.

But I wasn’t just biased. I was jaded. I had grown up in an evangelical church with pastors screaming about “THE REVIVAL GENERATION” as if churches weren’t emptying like a music venue if Taylor Swift was followed by a Nickelback tribute band. (Again, pre-order my sister’s book on Soul Survivor and evangelicalism.)

I also didn’t see the evidence. I would see occasional anecdotal references to full pews and busy pastors, but where was the data? Well, in 2025, a Bible Society report, based on polling from YouGov, claimed that congregations were indeed growing. I was unconvinced — referencing, among other things, the difference between reported and recorded church attendance as cause for doubt. But a lot of people were very much convinced. The headlines almost made it sound like the Second Coming: “Gen Z is flocking to church”, “Gen Z are turning to faith” et cetera. Op-eds bloomed. Podcasts blossomed. Conferences were held.

Then, last month, the Bible Society announced that YouGov had withdrawn the poll that its report has been based on, as it had contained “fraudulent” responses. This was unsurprising. A report based on British Social Attitudes data had failed to confirm YouGov’s results. “We have found little evidence of a religious – or more specifically a Christian – revival in Britain,” the legendary political scientist Sir John Curtice had written. The BSA data also suggested that Gen Z, far from “flocking to church”, were the least Christian people in the country.

It seems like the “Quiet Revival” was quiet in the same sense that the Loch Ness Monster is silent. What had made people so willing to believe in it? I’m sure some churches have seen their congregations grow — especially as a result of the migration of African Pentecostals. I can also see how some much-liked, well-shared conversions, advertised on social media, could make Christians believe in a broad societal trend.

But it is also the case that more people have been describing themselves in spiritual terms. 62 per cent of 18-24-year-olds, for example, according to a OnePoll poll, describe themselves as “very” or “fairly” spiritual. I think a lot of Christians have a vague deterministic attitude which encourages them to think that once people start questioning life, they will almost inevitably find themselves drifting towards Christ. To say “there must be something more”, for them, is to open the window that allows Jesus into your life.

I’d go so far as to say that a lot of believers — not all, or even most, but a lot — don’t really believe in non-believers. For them, a non-believer is a temporarily confused believer — or a believer in denial. “There are no atheists in foxholes” used to be a popular aphorism. Some religious thinkers, like the highly regarded Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, think we have a natural sense of the divine which has been obscured by sin.

I don’t think that this is true. Frankly, it seems crackers to think that the universe obviously exists because of an all-good, all-powerful God who became man in Judea and died for our sins, just as it seems crackers to think that the universe obviously exists just, er, because. There’s nothing obvious about it!

People who think of themselves as “spiritual” could mean it in all kinds of different ways, from a vague enthusiasm for Tarot cards to a deep emotional attachment to nature. This can be as close to committed theistic belief as drinking plant milk because of lactose intolerance is close to veganism.

I absolutely don’t say this in order to gloat. I do find theism plausible in the sense of its explanatory power — as a means of answering why there is something rather than nothing, and how consciousness could have developed, and how life can be soaked in meaning. I’m not a believer but I am at least very much challenged by belief.

Yet whether or not there is a God, revival is not simply going to happen. True, if God exists, there is a good argument that God is all-powerful, so in theory it could “just happen”, but history is not rich in bizarre events that defy all previous societal trends. Our ruling paradigms are materialist in the epistemological sense, individualistic in the existential sense and ideological in the moral sense. These are not fertile grounds for “revival” any more than Polish fields are fertile grounds for sweet potatoes. I’m not sure if it will happen, but if it does happen, it is hard to believe that it will happen quietly. A coup d’état might happen quietly, but that doesn’t mean that people will believe in it. A revolution — political or spiritual — makes noise.