Holy Smoke: the truth about the quiet revival – with grounds for optimism
Best of the Spectator
The Spectator
4.3 • 826 Ratings
🗓️ 9 April 2026
⏱️ 26 minutes
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Summary
The past year has seen a deluge of reports and investigations about young people finding faith and flocking back to Christianity – including here on Holy Smoke. All roads lead back to a Bible Society study which claimed that – backed up by polling from YouGov – a ‘quiet revival’ was underway. Yet, one year on, YouGov has pulled the survey due to data errors and the Bible Society was forced to apologise. While the credibility of the survey is undermined, this doesn’t necessarily chime with anecdotal evidence from some quarters. So what is the truth behind the ‘quiet revival’?
Justin Brierley, broadcaster and founder of Think Faith, joins Damian Thompson to provide his more optimistic assessment: that while the story might not be what it seemed, that doesn’t mean that nothing is happening. Could the decline in religious adherence seen over the past few decades be slowing? And what would his advice be to struggling parish churches, and to the new Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally?
Produced by Patrick Gibbons.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The British right is up for grabs. As May's local elections approach, the Conservatives face strong competition from Reform UK. |
| 0:07.9 | Join the Spectator's assistant editor, Isabel Hardman, for the spectator debate, the fight for the right, on Wednesday, the 29th of April in London. |
| 0:15.5 | We will pit the Conservatives represented by Matthew Saeed and Dominic Johnson against Reform UK, represented by |
| 0:21.5 | Matt Goodwin and Danny Kruger. To see which party truly represents the future of the right, |
| 0:27.2 | book your tickets at spectator.com forward slash fight. |
| 0:37.1 | Welcome to Holy Smoke, the Spectator's Religion podcast. I'm Daniel Thompson. |
| 0:45.7 | The Catholic Church in Britain and many dioceses around the world is reporting that record |
| 0:52.0 | numbers of people will be received into the church this Easter |
| 0:55.6 | Sunday. Yet it's far from clear that this will compensate for the number of Catholics lapsing or |
| 1:01.5 | dying off. And while much publicised claims of a quiet revival in British Christianity generally |
| 1:08.0 | have lost credibility, to put it it mildly after a Bible Society survey |
| 1:13.6 | that made extravagant claims for increases in the number of young Christians were found to be based on totally unreliable statistics |
| 1:21.6 | and the survey findings had to be scrapped. |
| 1:24.6 | Statistically robust surveys of British religious belief and practice tell a consistently |
| 1:31.4 | gulny story. |
| 1:33.8 | Belief in God was running at something like 75% in 1981, falling to 49% in 2022. |
| 1:43.9 | Self-reported weekly church attendance fell from admittedly quite low level |
| 1:48.5 | of 13% in 1983 to 9% in 2024. Weekly church attendance for 18 to 34 year olds, among whom this |
| 1:59.6 | quiet revival was supposed to be taking place, is about |
| 2:03.3 | 8% and hasn't returned to pre-pandemic levels. And as for Church of England, adult attendance, |
| 2:12.5 | it's 18% lower than in 2019. But anecdotal evidence of a recovery of the sacred in pockets of the |
| 2:22.4 | country is persistent and puzzling. I'm joined by the leading Christian writer and broadcaster |
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