Young Brits are searching for meaning, not religion

In this article, Humanists UK’s Dialogue Officer, Jeremy Rodell, dives a bit deeper into recent claims that Christianity is growing among the young.

The Bible Society’s The Quiet Revival report is both interesting and controversial – interesting because it claims that there is an increase in churchgoing, controversial because, as Richy Thompson’s article makes clear, there is a profound mismatch between these supposed increases, and the actual noted decrease in real church attendance reported recorded by the churches themselves. 

What to make of it?

Seen as a social phenomenon, religion has three main dimensions: belief, belonging, and behaviour. As we know from the British Social Attitudes Survey and the Census, self-identification with Christianity has declined in the UK over many decades – that’s ‘belonging’. The Bible Society’s study is instead focused on religious practice (‘behaviour’), although it also reports on belonging and belief. It puts Christian identity in 2024 at just under 40 percent, below the 46 percent in the 2021 Census. Nothing new or controversial there.

On belief, it reports that the proportion of people who think there is ‘probably’ or ‘definitely’ a god/gods or ‘some higher power’ went up from 38 to 42 percent between 2018 and 2024, the two years on which the study is based. For 18-24 year-olds it reports a surprisingly big jump from 28 percent to 45 percent. But the question covers a wide range of broadly religious and supernatural beliefs, not only those associated with organised religion. It tells us little about belief in the core tenets of Christianity.

When it comes to practice, levels of churchgoing have always been below levels of Christian identity. The study confirms that attending church remains a minority pursuit: nearly 90 percent of people in England and Wales say they are not churchgoers. The interesting finding is that those who say they are churchgoers have increased significantly, albeit from a low base. Overall it is up from 8 percent in 2018 to 12 in 2024. But for 18-24 year olds it is up from 4 percent to 16 percent, and 21 percent among young men. Although that means 84 percent of 18-24 year olds still said in 2024 they were not churchgoers, it is nevertheless a large increase.

The picture on church attendance from other sources can be confused by the fact that it has been recovering from the impact of Covid-19 over the past few years. A good example is a headline in the Catholic journal The Tablet in January 2025, which said ‘Big increase in Mass attendance recorded in Britain’. It turns out just to be referring to an increase between 2022 and 2023. In fact, the 2023 figure for mass attendance (555k) remains a long way below pre-Covid 2019 levels (702k). In contrast, the Bible Society study data indicate that Catholic attendance rose from 850k in 2018 to 1.8 million in 2024. 

You would think the Catholic Church would have noticed nearly a million more people attending in 2024 than in 2018. There’s a similar story with the Church of England. Here the Bible Society reports the Anglican share of churchgoers dropping but the absolute number increasing by 460k (because of the increase in the overall number of churchgoers). But the Church’s own Statistics for Mission annual report shows a decline in weekly attendance from 2018 to 2023 (the most recent year available) by 189k. It is a puzzle.

In a discussion on the report hosted by the Religion Media Centre, even Christian commentators struggled to explain why such a big increase in attendance is not being observed by the churches. 

Rhiannon McAleer, one of the report’s authors, highlighted that their polling, conducted online by YouGov, used a different methodology to the churches, whose figures are based on actual counts. Christopher Gasson, a Christian author and pollster, said that he had found that ‘young people claim to be attending church, but clearly they are not’. He found the effect most marked in inner cities, where social expectations to attend largely non-traditional churches can be high. 

In other words, at least some of the discrepancy might be explained by the difference between aspired and actual church attendance. But, as the study points out, why would that effect be so much bigger in 2024 than in the 2018 baseline year? Maybe social influencers such as Jordan Peterson have had more of a role than we think. Maybe some respondents were not entirely clear in their own minds about which church denomination they aspired to attend, skewing the denominational data. We don’t know.

Are other factors in play?

As Richy said in his earlier blog, it would also be surprising if the introduction of online participation in church services has not had an effect. We do not yet know how significant it is, or how to assess the associated levels of commitment. It is clearly a new feature, and in theory more likely to be used by younger people, but no one is suggesting it is sufficient to explain either all the reported increase, or the misfit in the figures. 

Immigration is another factor. Most immigration is from countries with higher levels of religious practice than the UK. So the higher levels of immigration we have experienced in recent years would be expected to have impacted the churchgoing data. There is an increase in non-white ethnicity in The Quiet Revival sample weighting between the 2018 figures, when it was based on the 2011 census, and 2024, when it was based on the 2021 census. 

We know from the Hope Together: Talking Jesus survey (conducted by Survation for a evangelical groups in 2022) that even during that Covid-19 period, while 19 percent of white British Christians attended services in person or online, the figure for other ‘white minorities’ was 28 percent and for non-white ethnic minorities it was 48 percent: a massive difference. But an increase in the share of the population from communities with high levels of religiosity does not seem to explain all, or even most, of the increase, nor does it explain the discrepancy with the data from the churches.

The search for meaning is real

Something is going on. It is clearly overblown to claim, as the Foreword to the Bible Society study does, that ‘the “tide of faith”, whose “melancholy, long-withdrawing roar” was described by Matthew Arnold, has now turned’. 60 percent of the population does not even identify as Christian, nearly 90 percent do not go to church, and the two major churches are reporting overall declines. Most young adults are still atheists. But it does appear that their belief in some sort of higher power has gone up. 

But even if self-reported churchgoing figures are unlikely to be accurate, they may still tell us something. The fact that young men in particular reported big increases definitely needs to be explored.

And what of the increase in young people who believe in gods or ‘some higher power’?

In a world of uncertainty, where loneliness, isolation, and anxiety are common, maybe it is not surprising that some people turn to religion or supernatural forms of spirituality, or a combination. But it is far from clear that these eclectic beliefs represent a sea change among the young, or that Generation Z will reverse the decade-on-decade trend of secularisation witnessed since the 1940s. 

The study also reports that, while 38 percent of the overall population agree that ‘society is better when it is shaped by Christian values’, that drops to 32 percent among 18-24 year olds. And a third of them think that the Bible is actually a source of harm in the world. 

Human connection

What does this mean for humanists? We’ve known for some time that we are living in a heavily online, increasingly atomised society. And there is no question that we are living through an era of disorder and profound uncertainty – environmental, political, technological, and economic. 

Public health data suggests this is all having a tangible impact – with NHS England concluding that likely one in five young people suffered with mental health disorders in 2023. In an era of anxiety, is a shift towards existential questions all that surprising? 

Along with meaning, the other human need at play here is connection – we are social animals. We need real people, and real communities. Social media alone is not up to the job. Many people meet that need through sports, politics, campaigning, the arts, and any number of other activities, including religion. And there are humanist communities all over the country. At the same time, much of the world’s most sophisticated software is deliberately designed to keep our attention locked onto our screens at the expense of real human connection. That is an issue for the religious and non-religious alike.