by Nick Spencer, Theos
Is there really a resurgence in Christianity? Nick Spencer interrogates recent claims before asking why young people are turning to religion. 13/05/2025
Archaeologists have a saying. “One stone is a stone. Two stones make a feature. Three stones make a wall. Four stones is a building. Five stones is a palace.” It’s a maxim worth bearing in mind when we encounter surveys that claim to detect signs of religious revival.
The painful truth is that if there had been a revival every time over–enthusiastic believers had found signs of one in the polling data, we would be living in the New Jerusalem. It’s not so much “one stone is a stone” as “one stone is a sign that ‘God is on the move’, and two stones, however small, is a bona fide revival, praise be.” Having perused the data for nearly thirty years, I have become tired of, and a little cynical about, such claims. And yet, recent trends have caused even an exhausted sceptic like me to take note.
Earlier this year, The Times reported a survey which found that members of Gen Z were less likely to identify as atheists than their middle–aged parents, and more likely to consider themselves spiritual. This had an impressively large sample size (10,000) but I have not been able to track the data down, so it’s hard to interrogate the results. The fact that it was published to promote a book about “post–atheism” doesn’t add to one’s confidence. Moreover, the word “spiritual” leaves me a bit cold, as the character of Will captured in the Inbetweeners 2 movie. Be all that as it may, this is still a stone.