The Quiet Revival is happening. We have the stats – and the stories too

Conrad Hackett’s recent Premier Christianity article describing evidence for a Christian resurgence among young adults as “weak” is an interesting read. He implicates various Christian organisations in this narrative, including Tearfund, the Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer and of course Bible Society, the popularity of whose report “The Quiet Revival” makes us the main culprits.

This claimed growth in religiosity among young people, he argues, runs counter to what we know about how religions around the world decline. He believes too that polls conducted for Christian organisations by Savanta and Bible Society are automatically suspect not just because of who commissioned them, but because of the methodology behind them.

“Opt-in” or “non-probability” surveys of the kind that YouGov uses are, he believes, prone to corruption through “bogus respondents”, who answer questions as quickly as possible to get a financial reward, and this casts doubt on the whole narrative of a Christian resurgence. Random or “probability” surveys are much better.

Well: YouGov pays 50p for a completed survey, you can judge for yourself how much of an incentive this is for bogus respondents. There’s also the question of why, if the responses are virtually random – as Dr Hackett argues – their tendency is all in the same direction, ie showing an increase in church attendance and religiosity among young people.

A ‘pew’ contradictions

Of course we can argue about the accuracy of different kinds of surveys, but perhaps only statisticians would really be interested. If only there were two surveys on the same theme, using different methodologies, one probability and one non-probability! If they came to wildly different conclusions it would be obvious that one of them was wrong. But if they came to the same conclusions, it would strongly suggest that both of them were right.

Fortunately, such a high-quality probability survey does exist, and a little inconveniently for Dr Hackett, the source is his own organisation. We analysed data from a recent Pew survey and found it places monthly church attendance among UK Christians at 37%, higher than The Quiet Revival’s 32% (for England and Wales). The British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA), which he cites as evidence against The Quiet Revival, placed it at only 24%.

Among all respondents, not just Christians, Pew placed overall monthly attendance at a whopping 16% – much higher than the 12% of The Quiet Revival and double the figure for the BSA. Among 18–34s, the YouGov and Pew figures were closer, at 15% and 13% – but that 13% was still more than double the BSA figure.

On one level, this Pew survey simply underlines what we have always said, that no survey is flawless and that all the evidence needs to be weighed over a period of time. On another level, it can easily be argued that it offers very strong support for The Quiet Revival report.

It’s probably too much to trust that we could now draw a line under all this, but I hope I have shown that arguments against The Quiet Revival thesis are in fact rather easily refuted, and are even contradicted by other reputable surveys.

The stats and the stories

Why do we remain confident that there is a Quiet Revival happening in England and Wales, which has seen more people – especially young people – attending church, greater spiritual openness and curiosity, and a recovery of the discipline of Bible reading among churchgoers?

Partly, it’s that YouGov’s data makes sense and we’ve never been given any reason to doubt it; many of the criticisms of our report have been terribly weak, and arguably driven by an ideological commitment to the secularisation thesis, a phenomenon already abandoned by one of its main architects, Peter Berger.

Our confidence in the data can also be attributed to the stories we’ve heard since the report came out. These stories, from every Christian tradition, have been of growth – sometimes explosive, but more often of people just turning up to church because they’d read their Bible or felt the need to explore faith, and staying.

Is it happening everywhere? Of course not; if you’re in a rural village you’re less likely to see it than if you’re in an urban centre. But it is unquestionably real, and church leaders need to factor it into their ministries.

And here’s a personal note: next year I will celebrate 40 years in ordained Christian ministry (I started very young). If at any time during those years a survey had come out showing that the Church was growing, my colleagues and I would either have laughed at it or ignored it, because we’d have known it wasn’t true. We aren’t laughing at it now, because we can see the change for ourselves and we know it’s different now.

Bible Society believes this movement of God needs to be rooted in faithful discipleship with the Bible at its heart. Revival doesn’t have to be noisy, after all; a Quiet Revival, one that is widespread and diffused across the majority of British Christianity, might well have greater staying power in the long run.

For the alternative view, read Conrad Hackett’s piece here