ARCHAEOLOGISTS have a saying. “One stone is a stone. Two stones make a feature. Three stones make a wall.” It is a maxim worth bearing in mind when we read about surveys that claim to detect signs of religious revival. Having perused these data for nearly 30 years, I have become tired, and a little cynical, about such claims. And yet, recent trends have caused even an exhausted sceptic like me to take note.
YouGov’s biannual tracker has been picking up unusual trends about belief in God among younger people in Britain since 2021. The proportion of 18-24-year-olds declaring such belief has climbed from 16 per cent in August 2021 to 45 per cent in January. Research by Barna, in the United States, found a 12-point rise in the percentage of US adults who said that they had made a personal commitment to Jesus: a trend driven again primarily by younger people. And then, last month, the Bible Society/YouGov study The Quiet Revival, replete with an sample size of 13,000 respondents, found that young people, and especially young men, were showing a recently unprecedented interest in Christianity (News, 11 April).
These three stories look a bit like a wall to me, and one that is, moreover, buttressed by innumerable anecdotes along the lines of (in the words of one vicar) “young man wandered into my church after the service today with the words, ‘I want to become religious.’”
If, indeed, this is “a wall”, it would be good to know why it is emerging now; and the blunt truth here is that we just don’t know. Data detect trends, but are less good at discerning motives. So, here are six hypotheses to get you thinking. Some may be spurious, and none is sufficient, but my sense is that some combination of them will help to explain this complex phenomenon.
ONE: the future. The prospect for younger people isn’t great right now. Generation Z cannot expect a higher standard of living than their parents, as their own parents once did. Saddled with debt by their early twenties, uncertain about long-term work prospects, condemned to wages that are unlikely to buy them a house any time soon, with all the knock-on effects that this has on marriage, family, and stability, there is a sense among this generation of being economically and socially disenfranchised. And, frankly, if this earthly kingdom seems not to have a place for you, you might start looking for another that does.
Two: men. This has hit young men especially hard. The (entirely proper and still incomplete) rebalancing of gender roles in work, and the fresh attention paid to casual sexism across society, has had a shadow side to it, in which the value and purpose of men and masculinity have been brought into question. Sometimes, the rhetoric has slipped from there being a problem with men to men as being the problem.
The demise of heavy industry and of many manual jobs has speeded this trend. The absence of fathers has not helped. Cumulatively, young men have faced existential problems which their own fathers did not. It is a phenomenon that Andrew Tate and his fellow misogynists have exploited, and one that has, more positively, driven some men to explore religion as an alternative and affirming narrative of what it is to be a man today.
THREE: immigration. Immigrants are almost always more religious than British-born people, and the historically high levels of immigration have certainly added raw numbers to the data. The data also show, however, that the apparent changing pattern of belief is a wider phenomenon than can be accounted for by immigration alone. More likely a factor is the idea that the mere presence of religious immigrants in UK society has pushed the visibility and prominence of religion up the agenda for many people.
Four: Islam. This is a refinement of the previous point. Some of the increase in religiosity in Britain is undoubtedly due to the higher numbers of practising Muslims. But so, paradoxically, may be the increase in Christianity.
The presence of a confident and coherent religious creed and culture, heretofore largely alien and unfamiliar, catalyses a degree of soul-searching, and forces questions about what exactly I do believe and why. Gone are the days when the British could lazily assume a kind of highly diluted Christianity-and-water as their own or others’ default religio-cultural position. Islam has helped to generate a kind of cultural permission, even a cultural imperative, to think about these things.
Five: social media. The rise in religiosity in an age group that has grown up in the time of the smartphone cannot be a coincidence. This is a cohort that has been christened “the anxious generation” by Jonathan Haidt in a book with that title (Books, 16 August 2024), and which suffers from exceptionally high levels of mental ill-health. The sheer toxicity of childhood for many today has left them looking for relationships that are genuine, embodied, and authentic, and not mediated by a screen or weaponised for Silicon Valley profits.
Six: the pandemic. Covid hit different people in different ways, but there is nothing quite like a period of enforced suspension and isolation to encourage a kind of existential reflection and re-evaluation. This may not lead to God, but it might at least get him a seat at the table.
TO REPEAT: none of these reasons is watertight, let alone sufficient. Moreover, some theologically minded readers might claim that I have omitted the most important potential reason, namely (to quote a friend) “a sovereign act of the Holy Spirit”.
Perhaps so, though I have an inbuilt reluctance to treat theological reasons of this kind as alternatives to the kind of social and cultural ones that I have outlined above, as such an approach seems to assume that God’s actions are necessarily against the grain of the created order.
Whatever the reasons may be, if this alleged revival does, indeed, turn out to be a wall, or indeed something more substantial, it will be on account of a complex set of causes. We must analyse them carefully, and, as far as we can, dispassionately.
Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos.
