For a year now, many Christians have been thrilled about the so-called ‘Quiet Revival‘. This is a revival they think is happening behind the scenes all over the Western world. Even better (from their viewpoint), it mostly involves Gen Z too, meaning that Christianity’s demographics death spiral is reversing!
Unfortunately, this Quiet Revival is mostly imaginary. The group that created that claim in the first place has now retracted it amid a flurry of apologies. However, it turned out to be an extremely appealing claim. Today, let’s go over the retraction. And then, let’s explore why the momentum of a satisfying lie is so hard to beat.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 3/27/2026. Please support my work! Check out the end of today’s writeup for options. From intro: Discord invite 8pkasaySuD for 4/18 Alpha Course watch party!)
SITUATION REPORT: The source of the ‘Quiet Revival’ claim now admits study was deeply flawed
The Bible Society is a UK-based charity that translates the Bible into local languages around the world and makes Bibles available to those who can’t afford or find one. Their work depends heavily on donations and volunteer labor.
In April 2025, the Bible Society announced that a Quiet Revival was totally happening. Their headline blared:
The Quiet Revival: Gen Z leads rise in church attendance
Church decline in England and Wales has not only stopped, but the Church is growing, as Gen Z leads an exciting turnaround in church attendance.
As we talked about at the time, numerous Christians leaped on the idea. And as we also talked about at the time, I had some serious doubts about the validity of the study. Not only did its findings contradict literally every single reputable study about Christianity in the West, but they used YouGov of all things—which I can tell you has some serious flaws just on its own.
Well, now the Bible Society has announced that their study was completely flawed. A March 26 statement from their CEO, Paul Williams, reads:
Earlier this month YouGov informed Bible Society that the 2024 survey sample on which our 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.
It’s nice that they reported the problem, but it’s still funny that their logic comes down to “mistakes were made, but not by us.”
Last year, the Bible Society itself did briefly mention some of the possible flaws of their study at the end of their writeup. But they dismissed those concerns immediately. Their study’s implications were far too glorious to overshadow with such petty details.
Indeed, this report ricocheted around the world. Religious and secular media groups alike marveled at all those Gen Z men supposedly clamoring to join and attend right-wing churches.
In their updated March 2026 report, the Bible Society drilled down on their Quiet Revival ideas—even as they admitted the YouGov data they used was “faulty.” But they still want a Quiet Revival!
Alas, the Quiet Revival was so quiet that it didn’t even happen
As it turns out, there is no Quiet Revival. There never was.
But the Bible Society isn’t letting the facts harsh their buzz. The FAQ they released contains this weird statement:
[U]nreliable data doesn’t mean there has been no rise in churchgoing. It means this particular data can’t be used to prove it. The Quiet Revival surfaced a significant body of corroborating evidence — from other surveys, studies, and stories from churches — which we outline in our new report, The Quiet Revival one year on: What’s the story? and which gave us good reason to believe something significant was happening.
Stories I can easily believe. For all too many Christians, the plural of anecdote is anecdata. But WHAT surveys? WHICH studies? Because nothing reputable I’ve ever seen supports—not “proves,” but supports—the notion of any widespread increase in church attendance anywhere in the West. And nothing supports that idea particularly out of Gen Z.
Sidebar: Decline statistics
In February 2025, Pew Research found that the decline of Christianity might be stabilizing temporarily. But they cautioned that since Gen Z is less religious than older generations overall (46% of people 18-24 identifying as Christian vs 80% of ages 74+), that plateau is likely temporary. They also tell us that between 2007 and 2024, the share of self-professed Christians in America has fallen from 78% to 62%.
In November 2025, Gallup found that the percentage of Americans who say religion is important to them dropped from 66% in 2015 to 49% in 2025. They said this drop was “the largest Gallup has recorded in any country over a 10-year period since 2007.”
In December 2025, Barna Group found that the percentage of “practicing Christians” in America fell from 46% in 2000 to 24% in 2025. They don’t break the data out by age group. However, a 2023 study they ran calls Gen Z “the Open Generation,” so they clearly think there’s a chance there.
As for the UK, in January 2026, Pew Research offered statistics to support their claim that “Christian identity and practice are not increasing among young adults in Britain.” Only 9% of British adults attend church at least monthly and only 44% of British adults even identify as Christian. The younger the adults, the less likely they are to attend church or profess Christianity. Further, Pew Research characterized the Quiet Revival as a “Christian revival narrative,” one which no decent study supports.
A 2024-2025 report from the UK’s National Churches Trust paints a very dire picture of disintegrating church communities there. In particular, the report says, “the number of church closures has been rising sharply in Scotland and Wales.” Without their extensive grants to those specific countries (detailed on p. 19 of the PDF), that number would likely be even sharper.
Further, this same group warned in October 2025 that 900 churches think they’ll be closed by 2030, while 2000 church buildings might be repurposed in five years. This is about 5% of the total number of churches in the UK.
The copium around the Quiet Revival continues
For today’s post, we’re going to look at sources published after or at least around the time of the Bible Society retraction. And there are a lot of them!
On March 26, Premier Christianity asked “Now what?” about the flawed study. In answer, they decide that “many other stories and statistics from across the UK suggest we are living in an exciting new era.” Then, on April 1, they came back with an admonition “not to measure the wrong thing,” because “Gen Z are still spiritually hungry.”
On March 28, Ross Douthat, a hard-right Catholic convert, declared that Christianity was both reviving and declining. He predicts that his religion might “become more influential on college campuses or in upper-middle-class culture without preventing a continued decline [. . .] overall.”
On March 30, Barna Group put out “new research” claiming that 29% of US adults think a “spiritual revival” is coming within 12 months. Gen Z respondents in particular thought this (38%). Their CEO, David Kinnaman, was careful to say that “the research doesn’t predict a revival.” It just says that a lot of Americans think there’ll be one within one year. And despite that carefulness, Barna still subtitled that section “Something is Stirring.” (In response, we say: Pics or it didn’t happen!)
(And by the way, I definitely recommend checking the Barna link out. The reasons preferred by age groups is very interesting. None of them can agree on why a revival is totally coming, which is a good indication that it isn’t.)
On March 31, The Atlantic offered us a look at “the real religious ‘renewal’ happening in Gen Z.” (This one’s extra funny because in 2023, they ran a post from Tim Keller announcing that “American Christianity is Due for a Revival.”) In the new piece, their writer concedes that hard numbers do not support any talk of widespread revival. But he still insists that “some young Americans are discovering traditional Christianity anew.”
Of the latest responses I could find to the Bible Society’s retraction, one comes from David L’Herroux on April 2nd. He’s the CEO of United Christian Broadcasters. In his response, he declared that “God’s Word still stands.” And he knows this because he hears anecdata every day that confirms his own beliefs.
Also on April 2nd, David Frost, a conservative politician in the UK, insisted that “Britain is quietly awakening to full-fat supernatural Christianity,” which he believes because he’s converted to Catholicism and “footballers are open about their faith in a way that didn’t happen a decade back.”
The reality of Gen Z and revival is bleak
A long time ago, evangelicals put forth the idea of a “4-14 window.” This term means that if they can’t at least get basic indoctrination into a child between those ages, chances are good that child will not convert later in life.
Gen Z’s youngest members are already 14. That means that they’ve already lost that generation. Anyone who isn’t already basically indoctrinated probably won’t ever be. Indeed, in 2022 the Survey Center on American Life published a study saying that 34% of Gen Z were unaffiliated with any religion, more than any other generation studied before.
Gen Alpha stands solidly within that time window, but they’re not terribly religious either. In fact, they seem less religious even than Gen Z. A Springtide study published in January 2025 indicates that only 19% of 13-year-olds (Alpha’s oldest members at the time) considered themselves “very spiritual.” For that matter, only 66% identified as Christian. Additionally, only about 30% attended church at least weekly, with 42% saying they never or only rarely attended. The Survey Center on American Life’s 2022 study said 40% of Gen Z claimed weekly attendance, so that’s a decided drop in numbers.
None of the anecdata I’ve heard has translated into churches gaining substantial new numbers of members, nor of a substantial raising of the average age of churches’ congregations.
We must expect blips in data when it comes to humans and behavior. Those blips take the form of the soft-figures Christian leaders use to try to demonstrate that there’s a real revival going on: increased Bible sales or cultural shifts or occasional Gen Z converts to evangelical or Catholic churches.
Rather, the overall trend is what we watch. We want to see if those blips translate into an actual reversal of decline.
And this is where the trend-line is taking us:
The Quiet Revival vs the PIB implosion coming churches’ way
In August 2025, a landmark study in Nature focused on three aspects of religious affiliation: Participation, Importance, and Belonging (PIB). Once participation flags, the feeling of religion as an important part of life fades too, and finally the sense of belonging at all to it fades. This isn’t a hard-and-fast pattern, of course, especially if fervent religious participation gets linked to nationalism in a country, but as countries secularize, it tends to hold true.
Perhaps most devastatingly from Christian leaders’ standpoint, in secularizing countries the younger folks are far less religious than older ones. I’ve never seen a reputable study saying otherwise. Once the younger folks start drifting away, there really isn’t a way to get them back or to recapture the next generation. And once those younger unaffiliated folks have kids, they’re exceedingly unlikely to get them indoctrinated. It’s a doom spiral all the way down.
In America, elderly folks form the backbone of countless church congregations in America. Those folks are going to start dying in earnest soon. And I join Ryan Burge in saying American churches are by no means ready for what’ll happen once they do. Worse, there has so far been nothing they can possibly do to reverse disaffiliation trends. They need young blood in those churches, but young blood has proven very difficult to acquire.
All these church leaders have left is hoping against hope that Gen Z (or Alpha, dare they dream!) suddenly gets a wild hair up its ass about religion and starts joining in massive enough numbers to offset the die-off coming their way. That’s where this narrative of the Quiet Revival finds its legs. And that’s where it falls down the hardest.
But who will Christians believe? Their leaders, or their own lying eyes?
NEXT UP: Nobody in evangelicalism seems to understand church growth. We’ll be helpful next time and show them why churches grow or fade. (Spoiler: It has nothing to do with Jesus!) See you soon <3
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