By Catherine Pepinster
The Bible Society’s chief executive, Paul Williams, said this week that despite its survey on Christian resurgence in Britain having to be junked for being based on false data, the organisation stands by its conclusions – that Christianity is growing, not declining.
Last year the Bible Society published its study, “The Quiet Revival”, saying that church attendance had increased by 56 per cent in six years from 2018-2024. It also said that there was a marked interest among young people in Christianity – and that church attendance had skyrocketed. It said that four per cent of 18-24 year olds had told a previous 2018 survey that they were Christian and went to church at least once a month – and that this had shot up to 16 per cent by 2024.
But a week ago, the society dramatically withdrew the report, based on data produced by You Gov, after the polling organisation said that data used in the report was flawed and anti-fraud devices to ensure that the sampling is accurate were erroneously not switched on.
It was a major blow to the Bible Society which had robustly defended the report when leading pollsters and some journalists had questioned the survey’s results, given they were so at odds with other studies of churchgoing and religious belief, which show continuing decline over decades.
But at a Religion Media Centre briefing on Monday, Bible Society chief executive Paul Williams said that despite the flaws in the report and despite the Bible Society recognising the data could no longer be trusted, it still maintains that the basic premise, that there is an upsurge in Christian affiliation in Britain, is correct.
It says that there is a new openness to religion and spirituality, which other Bible Societies around the globe have also noticed, and other smaller Bible Society surveys in Britain have reported.
“There are good reasons to believe that the fundamental direction of change, evidence in the main findings, is pointed to something real in the world,” said Williams. “It should make us curious, therefore, about the extent of that, the reasons for that.”
The Bible Society has produced a new report, “The Quiet Revival one year on: what’s the story?”, using material from other surveys, studies and stories from churches, which argues that unreliable data doesn’t mean that there has been no rise in churchgoing.
Williams also pointed to an increase in sales of the Bible which have risen in Britain by 106 per cent in six years and registrations to the Alpha course on Christianity – popular in both Anglican and evangelical churches – have increased by 35 per cent in one year.
Although religious identity overall is shifting from Christian to ‘no religion’, the Bible Society maintains that those involved – including younger adults – are more committed and active.
The Bible Society and YouGov say they will run the survey again this year and meanwhile the Bible Society will continue to conduct other research into attitudes towards the Bible, faith and spirituality.
You Gov has held its hands up over the report with its CEO, Stephan Shakespeare, apologising for the errors, saying: “YouGov takes 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”.
While Williams acknowledged during the RMC briefing that the Bible Society had come under “intense scrutiny” about the Quite Revival report, he insisted that “This is You Gov’s mistake, not ours”.
But others during the briefing criticised the Bible Society for publishing the report and for their handling of criticism.
Professor David Voas, emeritus professor of social science at University College, London and a specialist in research on religion, was critical of the Bible Society’s approach to the survey and said they were also responsible, and the findings were “too good to be true”.
“The Bible Society brought these problems on themselves,” he told the same online RMC briefing. “Experts have been telling them for the better part of a year, not only the figures are wrong, but why they’re likely to be wrong – bogus respondents and other problems that infect opt-in online polls – and they just refused to sit down with other academics and talk about that.”
Professor Voas also highlighted that it has become standard practice in social science to make underlying data available to other researchers but the Bible Society had declined for a year to let others study the material. If it had been peer reviewed, it would never have passed muster.
He said in the second report one year on, the Bible Society is still saying, “Nonetheless, our story is true”, But Prof Voas said: “That’s faith based advocacy. It’s not social science. I’m afraid that the new report is again based on anecdote, cherry picking statistics and wishful thinking.”
Paul Williams said the report was not written for an academic audience and cited Oxford University qualitative research indicating a fundamental shift in the direction of change.
Another leading polling expert, Professor Sir John Curtice, warned that accuracy in research is becoming more difficult due to the advent of bots and AI which can affect the results of opt-in surveys.
Sir John is a senior research fellow at National Centre for Social Research, which produces the British Social Attitudes Survey, and he told the briefing that from the first survey in 1983, results very clearly showed the decline in religious attendance. Recently there had been an increase in church attendance following the decline over the Covid lockdowns, but even so, the general direction is decline.
He said: “If I got data that came up with a curious story like this, I would be going, ‘Hang on. We need to check this out. There seems something funny here. How can this possibly have happened, given everything else we know.'”
He said there were difficulties with measuring only a small group of people, and polling companies do have problems: “Most people in the polling trade would say, ‘Well, look, at least YouGov run their own panel. They try to maintain the integrity of their own panel they’ve designed and have tried to improve things'”. He advised that “polling should be taken but not inhaled”.
Journalist Tim Wyatt told the RMC briefing that the Bible Society had frequently complained that critics of the report mostly had an ulterior motive, and were secularists or humanists committed to the church withering away, and that Bible Society staff had also attacked journalists like him, who were not secularist or humanist, for harming the faith of believers through their scepticism about the report’s findings. Williams apologised if he had felt that the Bible Society had been “overly robust with you or unfair”, and said “If you want to make public criticisms of a report, then you have to expect that we might make public responses back”.
Among the issues that advocates of a Christian resurgence regularly raise is the rate of adult conversion to Christianity. The Church of England reported that teenage and adult baptisms rose by more than a thousand in 2024, compared to 2023. And this weekend, on Easter Sunday, thousands of people are going to be received into the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales.
The two Roman Catholic dioceses that cover London are showing marked increases in numbers of new Catholics. In the Diocese of Westminster, for example, 800 adults are due to be received into the Catholic Church, the highest number for 15 years, while in Southwark there will be nearly 600 – the highest number for 26 years, bar one other year.
But meanwhile baptisms of infants are falling in both denominations, essentially, says Professor Voas, because their parents are leaving behind church attendance. “The dominant trend continues to be quiet quitting, not quiet revival”, he said.
However, there are anecdotal reports of increased interest among young adults. Canon Giles Goddard, vicar of St John’s Church in central London’s Waterloo district and author of “Generous Faith – Creating Vibrant Communities”, in which he writes about young adults engaging with Christianity, told the RMC briefing:
“People really want some kind of community that they can rely on and feel safe in. They’re very clear that what they’re looking for is community, stability, ritual, really, and a sense of meaning”.
Author and broadcaster Justin Brierley said there is a point to acknowledge that something had gone wrong, and because the Quiet Revival research had been so widely reported, its withdrawal had left a lot of people confused, disappointed and frustrated.
Bridges needed to be built between opposing sides. But it was too soon to say that nothing is happening. He said: “That would be an “opposite and equal error .. Let’s not put our faith in any one particular survey, but take the bigger picture on board”.
Nick Spencer, who has worked for 20 years for Theos which is funded by the Bible Society, said research shows there is a movement in Britain away from a default Anglican context, to one of default plural:
“Whereas the mood music 20 years ago was, broadly speaking, one of contempt, because it was just after the new atheist phenomenon, nowadays there is still some contempt, but there is much more interest, and to an extent, much more sympathy”. Whether that relates to higher attendance or a revival, is the subject of debate, he said.
In conclusion, Paul Williams said two things can coexist – the decline in nominal Christianity and and inrease in active Christainity. “The religious landscape is changing in a way we need to curious about and explore more, not get too hung up on the precise numbers”.
