In April 2025, The Bible Society published their influential report, The Quiet Revival. This report, based on data from YouGov polling, claimed that church attendance in England and Wales rose by 4% from 2018 to 2024 with the most dramatic increase among young adults (8-12% increase). Contrary to prevailing trends of religious decline among young people, the data from YouGov offered statistical evidence that Gen Z (ages 18-24) was leading a return to the Christian faith.
This claim seemed perfectly plausible as Christian organisations around the country were reporting a new energy in modern churches led by young people. The Catholic Church reported record numbers of conversions among adults, Bible sales increased to unexpected highs, and Christian influencers soared in popularity online. In the months following, the story of the ‘Quiet Revival’ took hold of mainstream media with news channels describing Gen Z as ‘the most religious generation alive’.
As the story gained popularity, it attracted critics. Those within churches reported that most parishes were still haemorrhaging members and that services packed with young adults remained an exception to the norm. Others challenged the validity of the surveys and the wishful conclusions drawn by Christian organisations. UCL Professor David Voas pointed out that, contrary to the data cited by the Bible Society, a larger survey showed church attendance continued to decline in 2024. In January 2026, Humanists UK published an analysis of British Social Attitudes Survey, cross-referenced with Anglican and Catholic church records, showing that church-going continues to decline for Gen Z. Humanists UK, a particularly vocal critic of The Quiet Revival, also accused the Bible Society of ignoring data and falsifying results.
On 26th March 2026, the Bible Society suddenly retracted The Quiet Revival report and issued a statement. They said that they had ‘repeatedly sought and received assurances from YouGov’ that the data were reliable and that ‘it was only at the beginning of March’ that YouGov informed Bible Society that ‘the 2024 survey sample was faulty, and it can no longer be regarded as a reliable source of information about the spiritual landscape in Britain.’ YouGov issued a statement accepting full responsibility for the errors in the data and stressed that ‘Bible Society has at all times accurately and responsibly reported the data [YouGov] supplied to them.’
The retraction of The Quiet Revival report has prompted a wave of reaction across UK media. Was there ever a Gen Z religious revival? Are there still Gen Z Christians? Humanists UK insisted we must accept that religion is in terminal decline. Yet, some Christian organisations insist something real is still happening in churches. Both sides, we would suggest, are missing the key question: Is religion or spirituality still important to the lives of young people?
There are better ways to answer this question than surveys on church attendance. Our own study began at Oxford in 2024 as a reaction to what we saw as crude methodologies that failed to capture the internal religious and spiritual lives of young people. Using qualitative and participatory research methods, we found that Gen Z, even those that are non-religious, have a unique and complex understanding of faith, morals, and spirituality.
Our study, recently published with Routledge, aimed to understand how young people imagine religious and spiritual role models — or ‘moral exemplars’. To do this, we used story completion: a research method in which participants write a short story in response to a prompt, in our case, featuring a fictional protagonist, Jesse, who encounters an influencer online. The choice of method was deliberate. We wanted to know how young people really felt about religious/spiritual role models rather than restrict them to box ticking.
Our participants were recruited through the University of Oxford and the Faculty of Theology and Religion’s social media channels, rather than through churches, religious organisations, or faith communities — a deliberate choice intended to reduce the risk of sampling only those already embedded in institutional religion. That said, we recognise that our recruitment approach carries its own biases: participants drawn to a university-affiliated study on religion and spirituality are likely to be more educated, more reflective about the subject, and more willing to engage with it in writing than the broader population of young people. We have tried to be honest about these constraints throughout, and they inform what we claim — and do not claim — from our data.
We also opened the study to anyone in the world who was between 18 and 27 and could read and write in English. We wanted our study to reflect the diversity of religious groups in the UK—a diversity that cannot be studied in a vacuum as it is shaped by migration from around the globe, as well as by the ability of religious and spiritual ideas to travel across borders through our smartphones. To capture important variables, participants also filled out a demographic survey on ethnicity, nationality, politics, and more. We received 131 submissions from participants across 34 nationalities.
This rich body of stories were then analysed using a qualitative framework we developed for this purpose — Exemplarist Narrative Analysis (ENA) which seeks to understand how exemplars narrated in each story embody religious and spiritual ideals. A second phase invited 54 participants to respond to anonymised stories; a third brought 15 co-researchers to Oxford for a two-day participatory workshop in which young people themselves contributed to the analysis. Through this participatory model, we engaged in productive dialogue on religion with the ‘least religious’ generation.
What our study — in just its pilot stage — found is that young people’s relationship with religion and spirituality is considerably more varied and alive than either side of the Quiet Revival debate has acknowledged. Many who identify as non-religious still turn to spiritual or mindfulness practices as a way of managing anxiety, social isolation, and the disorienting effects of heavy social media use, treating religion less as a matter of doctrine than as a resource for wellbeing.
Others who have left organised religion, or who criticise it sharply, do so not out of indifference but from within a moral framework that religion itself shaped: they want the church to be better, fairer, and more honest. Meanwhile, many young people, particularly those from non-Western backgrounds, maintain a strong, committed, and doctrinally grounded faith. And a significant number of our participants inhabit a more ambiguous position altogether: drawing on several traditions at once, resisting easy categorisation, and finding meaning in the uncertainty itself rather than despite it.
What is notably absent from our data is the confident, Dawkins-style secular atheism that is sometimes assumed to be the default position of a generation that has largely left the church. Very few of our participants expressed simple indifference to religion as a phenomenon.
Gen Z is also the first generation to have grown up entirely online, and this shapes their spiritual lives in ways that go beyond whether they attend a service on Sunday. They encounter religious and spiritual ideas through influencers, algorithms, and online communities; they describe digital life as a source of anxiety that religion and spirituality can, in some cases, help to address; and they are sharply aware of the difference between authentic guidance and performance.
The picture that emerges is not of a generation turning back to the pews, nor of one that has simply moved on. It is of a generation still genuinely wrestling with the questions that religion has always tried to answer.
None of this is to say that religious institutions will start growing any time soon or that the long-term institutional decline of Christianity in the UK is overstated. Rather, amidst the debate over religious decline or revival, we found that the search for meaning, for moral guidance, for some account of what makes a life worth living, is as present in this generation as in any other.
Claire MacLeod, University of Oxford
Dr Edward David, King’s College London and Blackfriars Hall, Oxford
The full analysis of our pilot study is available from Routledge as The Spiritual Narratives of Generation Z: From Divine Disillusionment to Simple Faith (2026).
The first 100 story-completion submissions can be found in our story repository hosted at the University of Oxford: portal.sds.ox.ac.uk/Understanding_GenZ.
Young adults aged 18 to 28, from anywhere in the world, are encouraged to take part in an exciting new phase of our research by visiting oxfordexemplars.org.
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