THE Bible Society has said that the survey sample on which its report The Quiet Revival was based was “faulty, and it can no longer be regarded as a reliable source of information about the spiritual landscape in Britain”.
In a statement issued on Thursday, the Bible Society’s CEO, Paul Williams, said: “We are. . . deeply disappointed that YouGov not only made an error but also that it only discovered this so recently.”
YouGov’s CEO, Stephan Shakespeare, apologised, saying: “YouGov take full responsibility for the outputs of the original 2024 research, and we apologise for what has happened. We would like to stress that Bible Society has at all times accurately and responsibly reported the data we supplied to them.”
When it was published last April, the report suggested that churchgoing among young people, particularly men, in England and Wales was growing, but not in the Church of England (News, 8 April, 2025).
The report compared two weighted YouGov polls on churchgoing and Christianity, conducted online in 2018 and 2024, of 19,101 and 13,146 adults respectively. This was supplemented by fieldwork carried out between 4 November and 2 December 2024. The report suggested that this showed “dramatic growth” in church attendance, owed largely to younger generations.
The report was subject to criticism, most recently by the Pew Research Center, which said that such reports “may be misleading” because they “canvass members of opt-in panels who have signed up to participate, often in response to website ads or email campaigns”, as opposed to surveys using random samples, which, Pew said, “do not show clear evidence of a Christian resurgence”.
Thursday’s statement by Mr Williams said that the Bible Society “recognise that this news may feel discouraging and we share that sense of disappointment.
“Over a 15-month period, Bible Society repeatedly sought and received assurances from YouGov, regarding both the robustness of the methodology and the reliability of the report’s conclusions. It was only at the beginning of March that YouGov confirmed that it failed to activate key quality control technologies that protect the sample from a wide range of errors and this undermines the reliability of the results.”
None the less, Mr Williams’s statement said, there was “plenty of other evidence that indicates that more people are finding faith today than for many years”.
In a FAQ section on its website, the Bible Society points to — and stands by — its new report, “The Quiet Revival” One Year On: What’s the story? “We would urge people curious about this to read it and decide for themselves,” it said.
“Based on the data we have and the other evidence collected in ‘The Quiet Revival’ One Year On: What’s the story?, we think Christianity in Britain is increasingly moving from being a declining nominal faith to being a committed and active faith; there is greater spiritual openness than in the past and a greater warmth towards faith and religion; and that there is a substantial opportunity for the Church in meeting the needs of the many spiritual seekers in society who are open to exploring the Bible and Christian faith.”
It also highlights anecdotal evidence.
“There is in fact a very positive story to tell. Over the past year we have seen an unprecedented public conversation about Christianity, with countless stories of a spiritual awakening among Gen Z, alongside greatly increased Bible sales in the UK, growing numbers of adult baptisms and confirmations, and increased attendance at evangelism courses,” it says.
“This wider picture is also supported by a number of other surveys, based on probability sampling, which point to an increased engagement in faith among young adults compared to older generations. Both the Ipsos Mori 2023 Global Religion Survey and our analysis of the most recent data from the Pew Research Center on Spirituality Around the World indicate that young adults in the UK are more likely to pray and attend a place of worship than older generations.”
The Bible Society, which says that it could not have spotted the error, and did not suspect that there was any issue before first being alerted to issues about the survey last month, explains what went wrong with YouGov’s research.
“YouGov has quality control systems designed to exclude survey respondents who are not based in the UK, who attempt to complete the survey more than once, or who give inattentive or random answers.
“Bible Society was informed in early March that significant parts of these systems were not functioning correctly during the 2024 survey — the result of human error on YouGov’s part. YouGov only discovered this recently, following a thorough internal review. This meant that a statistically significant proportion of responses were of low quality or otherwise unreliable, and the data cannot now be relied upon.”
The Bible Society was first told about YouGov’s “concerns” about the data in February, it says.
“Before then, YouGov had repeatedly assured us that there was nothing wrong with the data. We only learned in early March that serious failures had been found in their anti-fraud systems. After that, we worked as quickly as we could to establish the full picture before going public with a statement and correction.”
The Bible Society will be running another survey with YouGov “at the same scale as the 2024 survey (around 13,000 respondents), later in the spring, and we will also run further surveys — including probability surveys — with other companies, with a view to gaining as accurate a picture as possible of Christianity and the Bible in England and Wales. We hope to report back in the autumn.”
