Among evangelical these days, their fondest hope is for revival. They want Jesus to send them a massive new influx of fervent converts and re-stoke their own zeal with divine strength. Right now, their current belief is that there’s a quiet revival happening across the western world, particularly among Gen Z people. But it’s as false as all of their other beliefs. Today, let’s check out the revival that wasn’t there—and see why evangelicals want it so much.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 9/20/2025. No recording for this one, sorry!)
SITUATION REPORT: No, there isn’t a huge quiet revival going on anywhere in the West
Over the past six months, evangelical leaders have been working themselves into a lather imagining that there’s some kind of huge revival going on. Specifically, they’re telling their followers that Gen Z people—particular Zoomer men—are crowding into churches like never before. A July 2025 report from the Bible Society calls this supposed phenomenon “the quiet revival.” (Their report can be downloaded here.)
Its blurb tells us:
For many decades now, the general assumption has been that Christianity in England and Wales, and in particular churchgoing, is in irreversible decline.
There has, however, been a growing body of evidence over the last few years telling a different story. This story is one of a change in the spiritual weather. More public figures have warmed to Christianity. Young people are exploring faith. There is less hostility to religion. Firm numbers, though, have been hard to come by – until now.
These guys are just thrilled to report on what they call a quiet revival. They claim that more young adults “are believing in God” over the past six years. They’re reporting that the share of adults aged 18-24 who said they believe skyrocketed from 28% to 45% between 2018 and 2024. The overall rate of belief across age groups also, they claimed, rose from 38% to 42% in that time.
Additionally, after years of skewing female, church attendees are now apparently more likely to be male—particularly among adults aged 18-24. Some 21% of men in that age group reported attending church at least once a month, compared to 12% of women.
These hefty, self-soothing doses of cope are becoming more and more common. I tracked a slew of them from February to August. The rhetoric doesn’t change, only the date it makes headlines in the Christ-o-sphere. Even if we ignore the simple fact that revivals aren’t ever supposed to be quiet, these Christian leaders are simply wrong. Either they’ve deluded themselves or they are deliberately lying to their followers.
Christianese jargon and lore: Revival
In Christianese, a revival is more than a successful recruitment drive. It’s an outpouring of Jesus’ blessings from Heaven to a body of believers. It can be localized to one church, or occur across a country or even the entire world.
During a revival, Jesus strengthens believers’ faith (till the next revival!) and sparks the faith of great numbers of new recruits. It’s supposed to be a dazzling display of his power—a miracle with no natural explanations.
Most of all, it must result in tons of new converts. If it doesn’t, then it’s not a revival. It’s a “blessing” or an “outpouring.” Sure, it can still be dazzling and miraculous to onlookers. But it can’t be a revival.
So the very notion of a quiet revival is nonsense on its face. It’s a contradiction in terms. It gets readers’ attention, yes, but it can’t be a revival and also be quiet.
In their dreams, they are free indeed
All of this hype began around February. A Christian writer in the United Kingdom (UK), Justin Brierly, had earlier written a piece called “A Christian revival is underway in Britain.” In February, he gloated that he had successfully “predicted a rebirth,” with “the evidence coming in” to support his prediction.
A couple of weeks later, another Christian in the UK, Paul Williams claimed to have noticed “a growing openness to spirituality in general, and, for some, a re-evaluation of Christianity in particular.” He even hilariously attributed this “re-evaluation” to Alpha Course, that absolutely failtastic evangelism course that we’ve been reviewing lately. (PS: Next watch party is September 20, 6pm PT on the Discord! Invite code: 8pkasaySuD)
A couple of days after that, Greg Laurie, a pastor and evangelists, asked, all kitten-eyed with wonder, “Is America on the brink of another Jesus Revolution?” He referred here to a huge wave of conversions among young adults in the late 1960s-early 1970s. “It’s time to rebuild,” he confidently ordered his readers.
By April, even The Gospel Coalition (TGC) had picked up on this quiet revival, which they describe as “a new move of God in the United Kingdom and a greater openness and response among young people, especially men.” Their writer, John Stevens, doubted that evangelicalism could possibly be experiencing only “a spiritual fad,” though he had no problem whatsoever with laying that assessment on both Catholicism and Orthodox flavors. (Stevens is, of course, an evangelical leader. Self-interest always drives these guys.)
By May, Christians had taken the idea of a quiet revival for granted. Phil Knox was wondering how to “make the quiet revival louder.” He’s a “missiologist,” meaning he specializes in helping missionaries recruit people. Around then, Robin Ham, a blogger, also developed a huge 10-point listicle to help Christians “rise to this missional moment.” Premier Christianity, a UK evangelical site, offered 18 Christian leaders’ anecdotes to try to inspire more confidence in the idea of a quiet revival.
And by the summer, Christianity Today quoted Franklin Graham: “There is a younger generation taking the challenge of preaching to the continent and the ends of the earth.” In the same article, a theologian insists: “Europe is not post-Christian. It is pre-revival.” Greg Laurie shows up in that same article to advise Gen Z Christians to get more confrontational in their evangelism. (Yes, because that absolutely works great with Gen Z.)
It’s all just the same old hype
I’ve got some serious doubts about the reliability of this study. Their 2018 study sampled 19k people, while 2024 only sampled 13k. Moreover, they used YouGov, which is purely opt-in. If a huge Christian community or three decided to brigade either year’s study, there’s no real way these study designers could work around them. Worse, it means subgroups are going to be pretty small. If they only had, say, 500 men aged 18-24 in either study, an increase of, say, 20% sounds super-impressive but only gets them to 600.
But we don’t need to be statistics wonks to see the biggest problem with this study:
Churches are still closing by the truckload across the West. There is zero indication that this quiet revival has stalled or even reversed the decline of Christianity itself anywhere west of Serbia. Christianity itself has had no real impact on Gen Z or Alpha culture. (Gen Z folks are currently 13-28 years old. Alpha are 0-15. Beta just began to be born this year, but somehow I doubt they’ll be called that for very long.)
Of course, a few Christians have pushed back against the narrative of a quiet revival. Craig Nash of Good Faith Media suspects that if there’s anything like a quiet revival going on, it’s more of a “consolidation of conservative, evangelical influence” than any influx of new converts.
Being “deadly honest” about there not actually being some massive quiet revival
Ryan Burge, a former evangelical pastor who studies the decline of Christianity in America, had even stronger things to say about the notion of a quiet revival. In an April interview, Burge said (at 18:30 in):
There’s not a religious revival going on in America. Can we just be deadly honest about that? There’s not a huge return to religion. It’s just the share of Americans who are Christians has stayed around the low 60s (percentages) for the last five years. The Nones (none-of-the-above people, the unaffiliated) have stayed around 30% for the last five years.
Burge also stresses immediately afterward that this plateau can’t (and won’t) last. Young adults are overwhelmingly less religious than older ones. Once those older people die, they’ll be replaced by Gen Z and Alpha. These generations are less religious overall, which means their kids in turn will be less religious. “It’s just attrition,” he says. “It’s generational replacement.”
Of interest, Burge agrees with Pew Research in that this stall-out is just temporary. He predicts another jump in the percentage of Nones once that happens. It might go to 40% of Americans or even 45%, though there’ll always be some 40-50% of Americans who are “going to be religious no matter what.”
If there seems to be a blip in the numbers in terms of church attendance, it’s only because the pie itself has shrunk so much. We saw this same blip in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) earlier this year: Their ratio of baptisms to current membership looks less dire recently—but only because their membership has dropped so much in the past few years!
Why evangelicals desperately need revival hype
Evangelicals have a weird relationship with their religion’s decline and membership numbers. Having lots of members and being in a growing state means Jesus approves of them, their ideology, and their devotional practices. That applies to the big picture as well as the individual one. Any church Jesus likes will grow, just as any Christians Jesus likes will score tons of converts through evangelism. Growth cannot occur without divine help.
Though Christians do sometimes accidentally admit that church growth is a purely secular process, what I describe is the party line. Even in posts they write about growth that seem completely secular, they usually must at least include a boilerplate line about the utter necessity of prayer or talking up the need for divine “anointing” in the process.
(Anointing just means divine favor. It alludes to the Old Testament custom of literally pouring oil on the head of Yahweh’s leaders. Even today, evangelicals like the idea. Here’s Mark Driscoll explaining everything—not long before his megachurch empire came crashing down. When I was Pentecostal, we always used a little dab of Pompeiian Extra Virgin. At my first church, people had squirreled away tons of little bottles of it all over the church grounds, just in case.)
The reverse is true here, as well. A church Jesus doesn’t like will stagnate or shrink, eventually closing. Christians he doesn’t like won’t score any evangelism recruits. Success = divine approval, always. Lack of success = divine disapproval.
However, evangelicals in particular also believe in the Endtimes—a span of seven years at the end of the world as we know it (TEOTWAWKI). And in the Endtimes, they know that Christian membership numbers will fall off a cliff. As much as Jesus may show approval through church growth, the Endtimes marks a period when growth will seem almost impossible.
The idea comes from Matthew 24:10, when Jesus describes the Endtimes to his followers. Along with famines, earthquakes, and wars, he predicts that “many will fall away and will betray and hate one another.” So any time evangelicals talk about their religion’s decline, they invoke the Endtimes.
On one hand, evangelicals hunger for the Endtimes. But on the other, they don’t want to be declining because that means Jesus doesn’t like them. And on the gripping hand, at least some of them are well aware that growth is more of a secular process than a supernatural one.
The demographic time bomb has already gone off—even if it’ll take a couple more decades to finish exploding
Ryan Burge has the right of it. Without something really major happening in terms of Christians’ temporal power, Christianity will never regain its former dominance in the west. The ideology just doesn’t appeal to people on its own merits.
Some few might join churches and stick around for social connections, as they have been for years. But there’s just not a path forward for Christian leaders that leads to tidal waves of zealous, on-fire converts crowding churches to capacity and beyond. Pastors just don’t know how to sell their social groups on that basis, and I suspect evangelical ones bristle at the very idea that they even should. Most of them seem to think that all they need to do is hang out a shingle and “preach the Word.”
In future years, church leaders might begin selling membership in their groups as a social connection. More importantly, they may begin intentionally crafting communities to attract new members—while wisely keeping ideology in the background.
It’d be the smart thing to do. But it’d also require evangelicals to retool their entire thinking around what a church is and how it functions in a community. I’m just not sure they’re ready for that yet. Ten years ago, Pew Research pecker-slapped them with the undeniable fact of their decline. But they’re still incapable of engaging meaningfully with why they’re in decline in the first place.
NEXT UP: A fascinating archaeology study looks at one of the best-known rules in the Bible. It makes a surprising but plausible guess about its real source. Hint: Oink oink! Also: Don’t forget the next Alpha Course watch party on Saturday, Sept. 20 at 6pm PT (Discord invite link: 8pkasaySuD) See you soon! <3
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