More Bible sales do not equal more Christians

Recent years have seen a growth in Bible sales in the UK. This year has seen a surge in headlines claiming that this is due to the supposed ‘quiet revival’ of Christianity on these shores – with Gen Z particularly singled out as increasingly likely to buy Bibles as they turn to Christianity.

The notion that Gen Z has become more religious, or indeed that Christianity has been reviving, originates from YouGov polling in a Bible Society report called The Quiet Revival. This report has now been thoroughly debunked – in fact, the overwhelming totality of evidence shows ongoing Christian decline. And now it’s time to do the same for Bible sales, by pointing out an obvious fact: more Bible sales do not necessarily mean more Christians.

Where have the claims come from?

The story originates with the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), the largest Christian publisher in the country. As their Chief Executive Sam Richardson explains in a column in The Times, ‘Last year was the best year on record for Bible sales in the UK… The team at SPCK Group painstakingly analysed Nielsen BookScan data on Bible sales going back to 2008. We found that each of the past five years set a record… [The number sold] jumped from 192,000 in 2019 to 396,000 in 2025.’

He goes on to suggest that the increase is due to Gen Z, writing ‘Research published last year by the Bible Society called The Quiet Revival suggests that younger people — particularly Generation Z — are driving an increase in church attendance. While this research was met with some scepticism, for example by Humanists UK, our data on increased Bible sales adds further weight to the evidence for a Christian revival in Britain.’

What interest have the claims generated?

A lot of the media generated from SPCK’s analysis has leant into this Gen Z link, with much of it interviewing young people newly finding or deepening their engagement with Christianity and using their anecdotal examples as evidence of the supposed trend.

The coverage has been extensive:

• The Daily Mail: ‘Bible sales in Britain hit record high as experts say interest in religion among Gen Z has driven a 134% increase over past six years’ – the ‘expert’ in fact being Sam Richardson again, pointing not to anything in the Bible sales data but to data like The Quiet Revival’s as suggesting that Gen Z is more religious and then adopting this as his explanation as to why Bible sales are going up
• The Guardian: ‘“It’s younger people seeking some sort of spirituality”: UK Bible sales reach record high’ – the article again featuring The Quiet Revival report, Sam Richardson speculating in similar terms, and the quote in the title coming from the retail sales director at the Church House bookshop near Westminster Abbey
• The Telegraph: ‘Soaring Bible sales prove the young are looking for meaning in our soulless culture’ – an opinion piece that says at the start, ‘Anecdotal evidence from booksellers shows that the greatest interest in the Bible comes from the young. This parallels data about the recent “Quiet Revival”. An investigation by the Bible Society has found that churchgoing amongst 18-24-year-olds has quadrupled over the same period.’
• Premier Christian News: ‘Bible sales soar to record high in UK’ – same source, similar quote, same articulated reason
• The Tablet: ‘Gen Z report highest levels of gratitude, wonder, and spirituality as Bible sales soar’ – same source, similar quote, same articulated reason
• Christian Today: ‘2025 was a record year for Bible sales — UK’s biggest Christian publisher asks why Gen Z is heading back into Church’ – same source, similar quote, same articulated reason
• The Times: ‘Bible sales show sustainable Christian revival’ – the aforementioned comment piece by Sam Richardson

Why lay all this out like this? Because when something gets reported on repeatedly, it’s really easy to see those accumulated reports as cumulative evidence that what they say is true. That has happened with The Quiet Revival report too. By pointing out that this narrative comes back to the same two sources (growing Bible sales, and The Quiet Revival polling), it makes it possible to examine just those sources and see what the truth is in them.

Why are the claims wrong?

We don’t know of any reason to doubt that the number of Bible sales has gone up. But the first thing we know is that there isn’t a religious revival, and that Gen Z is in fact less religious than older generations.

We know this because all the best data shows it to be so. That includes the British Social Attitudes Survey, the British Election Study, and the Church of England and Catholic Church’s own recorded attendance data. The BES data was YouGov polling too, an example of different YouGov data contradicting itself. When we asked YouGov about this, they would not say which of their two sets of figures (BES showing decline or Bible Society showing growth) they thought were accurate.

And as the Church of England’s statistician wrote, ‘As [our] figures clearly demonstrate, by almost every measure, in almost every diocese, Church of England attendance and participation was still significantly lower in 2024 than in 2018 [the two years The Quiet Revival report compares]. It would be naive to believe that [our] figures are accurate to the nearest person; however, I am confident that the national totals and trends calculated from [our] dataset are broadly accurate.’

Set against this is the Quiet Revival, which consisted of two large YouGov opinion polls, comparing 2018 to 2024. But there is growing evidence that online panel surveys of this sort are throwing up erroneous reports, particularly when it comes to Gen Z.

Conrad Hackett, Senior Demographer at the Pew Research Centre, has written about this. His research shows that while several online opt-in surveys (including YouGov’s Quiet Revival polling) have now found higher levels of church attendance among young adults, surveys based on random population samples do not agree. He points out that:

‘Pew Research Center studies have found that online opt-in surveys may produce especially misleading results for young adults. For example, a widely reported online opt-in poll finding about Holocaust denial among young Americans did not replicate when the Center included the measure in our American Trends Panel, which recruits a random sample of participants via mail. A Center study found that young, online opt-in respondents are much more likely to answer “Yes” in Yes/No questions, regardless of the truth. And another found 12% of young online, opt-in respondents claiming they are licensed to pilot a nuclear submarine (versus 1% of those ages 65 and older).’

The true figure on the submarine question is vanishingly low – way under 1%.

So why are online opt-in panels producing random results, especially among the young? 

One answer posed by experts is a possible growing trend of people taking online surveys in order to get rewards from them. When someone completes such a survey, they get points that accumulate into vouchers. That includes people from poorer countries, using VPNs to access such surveys in richer countries, so the reward value goes further. They then answer questions very quickly – perhaps using AI tools to help.

Those people may be more likely to say they are younger because opt-in online panels often screen out participants that they don’t need, for example, because they have enough people of a certain age already taking part. Ipsos describes young adults as a ‘hard-to-reach’ subgroup. So if you’re a 50-year-old and you want to get a reward for completing a survey, you might be more likely to be able to do that by claiming you’re young. That could lead to more fraudulent participants among those that the survey records as 18-24.

The online opt-in pollsters try to keep up with this issue with fraud detection questions. But it’s an ongoing arms race, with the rise of VPNs making it easier for people to access such surveys from all over the world.

Whatever the cause, results like the nuclear submarine survey show there is a consistent trend of online opt-in panels producing somewhat bogus results among young adults. Since the Bible Society survey was based on similar-size results among young adults, they may fall foul of the same issue. That’s why we need to look at sources other than online opt-in panels. And those other sources all show ongoing declines in church attendance, with Gen Z the least religious.

So if the number of practising Christians is shrinking, why are Bible sales growing?

First, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the numbers here. SPCK says the number sold ‘jumped from 192,000 in 2019 to 396,000 in 2025’. But the number of Christians in the UK runs to the tens of millions, and the number of practising Christians to the millions too.

David Voas is Emeritus Professor of Social Science at UCL – one of the country’s leading quantitative experts in religion. He pointed to an alternative explanation: that this increase – large in proportional terms but relatively modest compared to the number of actively practising Christians – may just reflect those practising Christians buying more Bibles.

Sam Richardson’s Times piece eventually gets onto explanations like this. He writes, ‘Interestingly, it is the more traditional-style Bible translations that are showing the biggest growth. The new market leader in 2025, the English Standard Version (ESV) [first published in 2001], is a direct descendant of the King James Bible, and retains much of its cadence. Since Advent [December] 2024, the English Standard Version Catholic Edition (ESV-CE) has been the official liturgical Bible used in Catholic churches across Britain.’

SPCK’s blog wrote on a blog ‘While we spent a few decades without a Bible licence, that changed in 2014, when our CEO Sam Richardson joined the SPCK Group. We re-entered Bible publishing with the NRSV Bible, followed by [several other new editions].’ David told us that ‘Since that time they’ve come out with one new edition after another, catering to every subgroup and interest.’

Sam Richardson writes that ‘some of the bestselling editions in our analysis are editions… which are generously priced to be used as giveaways in evangelism.’ This could be interpreted to suggest existing practising Christians buying Bibles.

David also pointed us towards this in the Wall Street Journal, on similar trends in the US:

‘The proliferation of new editions and innovative designs has made this a golden age of Bible publishing. According to  J. Mark Bertrand, founder of Lectio.org, a website about Bible design, the demand may be largely driven by targeted marketing efforts, alongside a growing demand from people looking for answers.

‘“I’d like to say there is a craving for knowledge of scripture, but a lot of smart people are thinking about Bible marketing and catering to every whim for Bible study,” Bertrand said.’

There is a growing number of speciality editions of the Bible. There are 162 pages of choices in the Bible section of eden.co.uk.

Why does all this matter?

It affects everyday life. It’s even now affecting planning decisions for a church expansion in Norfolk, and could lead to bigger impacts still. Public discourse must be accurate. And the truth is that Christianity in the UK is continuing to decline.

Humanists UK has also recently expressed dismay at US-style Christian Nationalism coming to UK politics. We are concerned that the false narrative of a large-scale Christian revival in the UK could be used to justify a move towards this.

Humanists UK Chief Executive Andrew Copson commented:

‘It is clearer than ever that recent claims of a wide-scale Christian revival, whether misinformation or disinformation, need to be retracted. At a time when truth in these social questions has never been more politically important, everyone has the obligation to be rigorous in their presentation of data in the public realm and the claims they make for it.’