We thought Gen Z had started going to church in droves. But the truth is more complicated

When Jay Painter's grandfather died in May 2024, the 27-year-old from Wiltshire felt he saw his soul leave his body.

It sparked a "search for the truth", culminating in the atheist being baptised as Christian later that year, after he read the gospels and saw the words "screaming" at him on the page.

"It was in that moment that I knew I was not righteous anymore, and I knew I needed saving," he says.

Most of Jay's friends and family are not religious, and he does not always find it easy to talk to them about his new faith.

But a few months after his baptism, headlines appeared about a "quiet revival" of Christian belief among young people, which made him feel less alone.

"It can be tough to get people to listen at times, but this idea of the quiet revival and more media attention helps," he explains.

"When you find people your age that are on fire for Jesus, and are also searching intently, it can be really motivating and really inspiring, and just to know that you're not on your own."

Prior to last year, it had long been accepted that Christianity was declining in Britain - from the days when most people were Christian, to an increasingly atheist and multi-faith society where derelict church buildings were being sold off and turned into cocktail bars and luxury flats.

But in 2025, a new report from the Bible Society called The Quiet Revival started to challenge the idea that Christian faith was waning. Based on an online YouGov survey it commissioned, it suggested the number of Gen Zs attending church in England and Wales had skyrocketed in the past six years, to the surprise and delight of Christian communities.

It spawned press coverage across the country, with churches presenting their own evidence of young people "turning to Jesus", and Christian groups asking how to make the quiet revival "louder".

Last September, the diocese of Guildford held a conference called "turning up the volume on the quiet revival", where 600 people heard the theory likened to "a great wave sent by God".

But now the report has become the centre of a fierce debate among experts who are questioning its findings - and the entire premise of the quiet revival, which was primarily based on one survey.

They say there is growing evidence that some online surveys aren't reliable, especially when presenting data on young people, and when respondents are rewarded for taking part.

Is it possible Christianity is not growing after all? And what has the impact been of widespread belief that it is?

Data from two YouGov surveys appeared to suggest the number of young people regularly attending church had quadrupled over a period of six years.

In 2018, 4% of the 18-24 year-olds surveyed told YouGov they were Christian, and they went to church at least once a month - this rose to 16% by 2024. Among all age groups, those numbers went from 8% to 12%.

David Voas, emeritus professor of social science at University College London, who thinks the YouGov figures are not representative, says if the quiet revival was real, "we'd be looking for literally millions of new churchgoers, and they'd have to be very quiet indeed, not to say invisible, to have escaped our notice".

Other sources - including different surveys and statistics from churches themselves - also tell a different story to the YouGov data.

Official figures from the Catholic Church of England and Wales and the Church of England show long-term declines in attendance. According to the CofE's latest report, it fell between 2018 and 2024 "by almost every measure, in almost every diocese".

Voas also points to the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen)'s British Social Attitudes (BSA) Survey - considered the "gold standard" in its field - which found data almost exactly the opposite to that of the Bible Society.

Its long-running annual survey found that in 2018, 12% of respondents said they were Christian and attending church at least monthly, down to 9% in 2024. Analysis of the data by Pew Research Center showed that among young people aged 18-34, the numbers were lower - falling from 8% to 6%.

NatCen senior research fellow Prof Sir John Curtice says his organisation's "successive readings" each year showing the same trend gives him greater confidence in their results than in YouGov's set of two data points.

Had he been given the YouGov data, he says he "would have gone back to the polling agency and said "are you sure?"

"Because if it doesn't look like a duck, it may not be a duck," he explains. "Because it's so much at odds with long-term evidence, long-term trends."

But report authors the Bible Society stand behind the findings, which it says it has checked with data collectors YouGov.

The polling company says the report "has generated a very unusual number of queries" which it takes seriously.

Dr Conrad Hackett, senior demographer at US-based think tank Pew Research Center, studies the size of religious groups around the world.

He has spoken out against the quiet revival theory, explaining: "Generally speaking, at Pew Research Center, we just focus on doing our research and not on talking about work that other organisations are doing.

"But we feel like it's a concern that the public is hearing again and again there's a revival going on in Britain, and I think that's misleading."

It has been mentioned in Parliament - Danny Kruger MP, then a Conservative, now a member of Reform UK, named the Quiet Revival report as evidence that "there are great things happening in the world. Christianity is not oppressed, downtrodden or downcast".

And as well as making headlines in the UK, claims of a revival have been made abroad. Hackett says "similar kinds of surveys being conducted elsewhere" are "pointing back" to the Quiet Revival report.

"It's sort of a global phenomenon and they're exciting each other and it creates a very misleading narrative."

Much of the debate around the data underpinning the quiet revival centres on the differing survey methods used by different researchers.

The BSA Survey is known as the "gold standard" in the polling industry because of its longevity, and its use of random probability sampling, which means everyone in Britain has an equal chance of being picked to take part.

In comparison, YouGov is an "opt-in" survey company, meaning people volunteer themselves to take part, in exchange for points, which can be converted to cash.

Hackett says that opt-in polling companies can be victim to "bogus respondents", skewing their data.

"And it's not random," he says. "The distortion tends to be highest among younger respondents."

He says bogus respondents could include people taking surveys very quickly to get rewards, pretending to be younger than they are so they can get access to a broader range of polls, or even those in poorer countries using virtual private networks (VPNs) to take surveys as if they are in richer ones, as the money is worth far more to them.

It was the Bible Society that wrote the Quiet Revival report based on the YouGov figures it commissioned. How is it responding to the idea of bogus respondents?

"Sometimes, especially in smaller, quick and rough surveys, you just get these bonkers answers," says Dr Rhiannon McAleer, director of research and impact at the Bible Society.

She says that having looked in detail at the responses to what was a lengthy survey of around 100 questions, she is satisfied the respondents were genuine and their answers consistent with people of faith.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is another problem for the polling industry - with respondents potentially using chatbots, which can carefully mimic the way a human would complete a survey, to do the work for them.

YouGov told the BBC that unlike other pollsters, it recruits and maintains its own panel of respondents.

A spokesperson said: "Our approach to dealing with bot respondents is therefore layered across the panellist lifecycle, from registration to participation to reward, combining identity checks, device fingerprinting, multi-source geolocation, real-time threat scoring, and payout oversight to ensure bad actors do not slip through the net.

It says it is going to look again at the topic when it repeats the study later this year.

While the data behind the Quiet Revival report is contested, there do appear to be some pockets of revival in Christianity in Britain.

There is an expansion in some denominations such as Pentecostalism, for example, partly driven by immigration.

And even if the numbers of Christians in Britain are declining, members of clergy report anecdotally that those who remain are expressing their faith with more zeal and vigour than previously seen.

McAleer, of the Bible Society, says: "The discourse, the tenor of the conversation, is different in the last two years.

"We're seeing a greater confidence among active Christians, particularly those who are younger."

She says although she is confident the Quiet Revival report is "picking up a true trend", the response to it has shown her that she cannot rely on statistics alone to get the whole picture.

"This is not straightforward, and there's no church census coming that will put a stop to this once and for all."