The Church Mouse Blog

30 March 2026

In a troubled church, in a troubled communion, in a troubled world, Archbishop Sarah takes up her new ministry as Archbishop of Canterbury. Her appointment is a historic milestone and has been met with the widest possible range of reactions.

Mouse's offers up his prayers for Sarah and will be praying in particular for five things:

1. That Archbishop Sarah boldly proclaims the truth of Christ crucified without fear and without co-option. That the Christ she shares is the one about whom the scriptures testify, not one who has been re-edited and re-drawn to support political agendas.

2. That Archbishop Sarah finds new ways to articulate the gospel of Christ to generations who have not heard or understood it before. As more and more people in the UK grow up in households where there is no tradition of church-going, Bible reading or prayer, I pray Archbishop Sarah will lead us in finding new ways to communicate to new generations.

3. That disagreements in the Church be held openly and honestly and that Archbishop Sarah will not become a personal focal point for entrenched positions and long-running disputes, but that she will be a facilitator of conversations which allow both grace and truth to rise to the surface.

4. That Archbishop Sarah is strengthened to lead the Church in England to become a beacon of hope where people of all faiths and none are struck by the commitment of the Christian community in living a life which reflects Jesus's teaching to love our neighbours, serve the vulnerable and the needy, strive for peace and reconciliation as we exhibit the fruits of the Spirit.

5. That Archbishop Sarah is able to support the growth of the next generation of leaders in the Church of England, able to continue this work after her term as Archbishop has ended.

May God richly bless her, strengthen her with His Spirit and inspire her leadership of the Church. May God help us to see our role in supporting her and working with her in the service of Christ.

24 November 2025

Far be it for Mouse to suggest he is ahead of the curve, but 15 months after Mouse observed the need to understand how the Church of England does its doctrine and published a comprehensive guide to the subject, the good old CofE has had a go itself.

The Bishops realised that doctrinal discussions within the torturous LLF process hit the rocks in part because people were talking past each other with different understandings of the nature of doctrine. What does it mean to 'change' doctrine? Is that even possible? What actually is doctrine? And can the church hold more than one doctrine at the same time?

Their response was a theological study, commissioned by the Faith and Order Commission, called The Nature of Doctrine and the Living God.

Mouse has a few observations.

1. The report does not deal with the role of the Faith and Order Commission itself

The role of the Faith and Order Commission (FAOC) is as an advisory body to the Bishops, General Synod and the wider Church. It is made up of 16 members, around half of whom are bishops, and is appointed by the Archbishops. As a result of this, the group has no formal role in the Church of England. Its role is simply to consider topics as requested and publish reports. Previous incarnations of this group have included the Faith and Order Advisory Group and the Doctrine Commission. These groups are all a 20th century innovation, starting with the Doctrine Commission in 1922.

In not addressing the purpose and role of the group, its deliberations or positioning how it will be used by the church, it reads merely as an abstract discussion of a topic with no particular purpose or direction.

The Church of England regularly offers doctrinal sounding statements from the House of Bishops. Synod votes on matters with clear doctrinal implications. Liturgies are revised with consequential doctrinal implications. Yet the role of each of these is not discussed and the FAOC does not position its own work in the context with which the Church is expected to read it in relation to these other official seeming acts.

2. The report does not mention any previous attempts by the Church of England to answer the same questions

When Mouse first sat down to read the new report, he had assumed that it would start with a review of previous authoritative statements by the Church of England on the matter. His own article on the subject looked at the foundational documents of the Church of England (39 Articles), the Canons, then the major publications from the Church of England on the subject, starting with the first Doctrine Commission report of 1938, Doctrine in the Church of England. The 1938 report was commissioned with the remit:

To consider the nature and grounds of Christian doctrine with a view to demonstrating the extent of existing agreement within the Church of England and with a view to investigating how far it is possible to remove or diminish existing differences.

Sound familiar?

The 2025 report, does not mention the 1938 report. It does not mention the Doctrine Commission's 1968 report on the nature of the 39 articles and their role in defining the essential doctrine of the Church, entitled Subscription and Assent to the 39 Articles. There is no mention of the 1981 publication by the Doctrine Commission Believing in the Church. It does not consider the role of General Synod and the House of Bishops in the Church's theological considerations. Most astonishingly, there is not a single mention of either the 39 Articles or the Canons or an attempt to analyse how they establish the parameters of doctrine in the Church of England.

Perhaps the most significant contribution to the discussion on the nature of doctrine within the Church of England is found in the Doctrine Commission's 1981 document Believing in the Church in a chapter partly authored by an up-and-coming young theologian called Tom Wright entitled ‘Where is our doctrine to be found?’.

For Mouse, the failure to recognise or build on these past sources represents a gaping chasm in the report, which reads as if it is the first time anyone in the Church of England has ever had the idea of attempting to define the nature of its doctrine. This is particularly problematic as the specific remit of the report is, 'to provide clarity around how doctrine can develop or change within the Church of England.' [Mouse's emphasis]

Image created using Microsoft Designer AI

3. The report derives its authority from a random selection of theologians

In place of building on previous work in the Church, the report instead starts from first principles with a theological review. Included as authoritative sources for this work were:

Thomas Aquinas
John Calvin
Richard Hooker
John Henry Newman
Brooke Foss Westcott
Michael Ramsey
Kevin Vanhoozer
Anthony Thiselton
Alister McGrath
Sarah Coakley
Ellen Charry
Mike Higton

The works of these theologians is reviewed and the conclusion is reached that they are, essentially, of one accord. Sadly, this conclusion has been somewhat undermined by one of the theologians themselves. Writing at Via Media Mike Higton has rejected the report stating plainly, 'I for one, however, do not recognise my own work on doctrine in this formulation.' He writes that he had no idea his work was being included until someone pointed him to the report post-publication. He concludes, 'There are several divergences between the account I offer in the book and the ‘consensus’ that I am supposed to support.'

Yikes.

Perhaps a more fundamental question, however, is who decided that this group of theologians are the authoritative source for such a study? Mouse's hunch is that the idea was to gather the views from group from diverse theological perspectives and show that since they all essentially agree on this question it isn't really up for grabs. But in order to do this, they have to shoehorn complex views (such as Higton's) into a narrow conclusion and we are left to wonder if these really are some kind of representative sample of theologians and who else could have been included who might have offered a different perspective, not least the work of Tom Wright in the Doctrine Commission's own 1981 report on the very same subject.

4. The report does not answer the questions it was asked

The Nature of Doctrine and the Living God was not commissioned as an abstract theological reflection on doctrine, but specifically to address a series of questions arising from the LLF process. These include how doctrine develops or changes within the Church of England. The report offers no examples of doctrine that has or hasn't developed, or attempts the church has made to handle theological difference in the past. The question is simply not dealt with.

The commission from the bishops also included the questions:

Is it possible to hold multiple doctrines simultaneously, in order to respond in the most gracious and pastoral way possible, even when this is messy or incoherent? Is it possible for there to be a range of interpretations of one doctrine?

But the report doesn't even attempt to answer these questions. This could have been tackled by reference to the previous Doctrine Commission reports Mouse has mentioned and a historical review of the subject. The outcome is a report which offers a perspective, but does not conclude on the key matters and we are left to wonder our position if we simply disagree.

So where next?

Sadly Mouse is not optimistic that this report will help the Church move forward. The 1938 report of the Doctrine Commission took 16 year to produce. Once published it sunk without a trace and has barely seen the light of day since. In part, that is because the Doctrine Commission, like its present day successor, holds no formal position. Its reports are merely advice to the Bishops and the wider church which it can freely ignore at will. It did not help the church come together and find unity on the controversies of the day. Mouse fears the same fate for this one. The good ship LLF has been dashed on the rocks and there is no hope that this report will offer us a life boat.

18 August 2025

The Bible Society has published stunning data appearing to show a dramatic increase in church-going in England and Wales. But this Mouse has declared himself a Quiet Revival sceptic. He has now had the chance to review the data and thinks there are good grounds for this scepticism.

In the unlikely event that you have missed it, the ‘Quiet Revival’ is the title of a report from the Bible Society that has made the extraordinary claim that the Church in England and Wales has, despite everything we have previously believed, experienced dramatic growth in recent years. Two YouGov polls were conducted, one in 2018 and another in 2024, asking large samples of their actual experience of attending church. It showed a significant growth in attendance, led primarily by young people.

This news has received a rapturous welcome from those who have been predicting revival in the UK for as long as Mouse can remember, and has gained mainstream media attention from sources as diverse as The Sunday Express, The Times, BBC Radio 4's More or Less and The New Agents podcast. Many have honed in on the reported increase in 18-24 year olds attending church, arguing that the increasing uncertainty in the world today is causing young people to ask bigger questions about their future and their place in the world.

While Mouse would love to believe that people are flocking back to church, his instant reaction was that it simply didn't fit with the data we have from every other reliable source. Most importantly, the actual counting of bums in seats at all the major denominations. In fact, over 70% of the growth the Bible Society report claims to have spotted comes from two denominations which are self-reporting that they are shrinking.

At the time of Mouse's last blog, the underlying survey data tables which the Bible Society used as the basis for their report were not publicly available. Now that they are, Mouse has had a chance to have a look. Mouse also note an important article by the eminent David Voas, Professor of Social Science at UCL and a highly reputable authority on such matters. Professor Voas, like Mouse, has declared himself a Quiet Revival Sceptic.

So what is wrong with the Bible Society's data?

On one level, there is nothing wrong with it. Two surveys were conducted by the respected polling organisation YouGov and the results have been summarised accurately, albeit with a focus on the numbers which tell the most positive story. The wider picture the data reveals is one where the total number of people who call themselves Christian is more or less the same, but with a notably higher level of claimed church attendance from within that group.

Mouse's previous comment pointed out the rather obvious point that this data doesn't match what the churches themselves have reported or data from other well-known authoritative surveys. David Voas makes the same observation, but also points out that the YouGov data also differs from survey data produced by the highly respected polling organisation ... errr ... YouGov. As Professor Voas summarises:

The findings are also inconsistent with other data from YouGov, the polling firm that collected the data for the Bible Society. A decade ago, the British Election Study (BES) commissioned YouGov to create an online panel. This panel, which includes more people than the Bible Society surveys, was asked about religious affiliation and church attendance in 2015, 2022 and 2024.

According to YouGov’s data for the BES internet panel, the share of Christian churchgoers in England and Wales declined from 8.0% to 6.6% between 2015 and 2024, whereas YouGov’s surveys for the Bible Society apparently show an increase from 8% to 12% between 2018 and 2024.

That's right, YouGov had already created a panel measuring church attendance and has now created another survey to contradict their own earlier data. The BES panel uses a more rigorous methodology too, keeping contact with the same panel members over time to ensure comparability in the different data sets. It is a long-term study project, which has been running since 1964 with a panel of 30,000 people currently in the survey. The BES data matches other sources, including the British Social Attitudes Survey, widely seen as the most authoritative source of data on these issues.

So why does the Bible Society study show something different?

Mouse would point to three key points:

1. Different questions were asked

Reporting suggested that the same questions were asked in the two surveys, which is technically true in the sense that the questions driving these results were worded in the same way. But in one of the surveys a number of other questions were asked before getting to the crucial ones on church attendance.

In the 2024 survey, before asking how often the individuals attended church in the last month, an additional series of questions was asked. Participants were asked whether they think ‘It’s important to me to try to make a difference in the world’ and whether they agree with statement like ‘My life feels meaningful right now’. In total eight additional questions were asked of this nature.

There is a very well known psychological phenomenon called priming, whereby you can incluence thoughts and behaviours through the use of an earlier stimulus or prompt. One example is that you can get a different answer to the same question depending on whether that person has been primed to think in a particular way beforehand. In one famous study, people were asked to guess the date the Mongul ruler Genghis Khan died (1227). Half the group were asked to write down the last three digits of their phone number before making their guess and half were not. The group who were primed to think of an unrelated three digit number were more likely to guess a date before the turn of the first millennium - in other words they were primed to guess a three digit number.

So Mouse is left to speculate whether being asked if you feel connected to your community and have a meaningful life immediately before being asked if you attended church recently has a similar priming effect. In some respects, it would be a surprise if it did not.

2. The surveys were conducted at slightly different times of year

The 2018 survey fieldwork was done between 11 October and 13 November, while the 2024 survey was just a couple of weeks later from 4 November to 2 December.

Ordinarily a two week difference would not be considered significant, but looking at the dates makes Mouse speculate whether it had an impact in this case. It certainly isn't speculation that in December you are running into a lot more Christmas trees and hearing a lot more of Wizzard wishing it could be Christmas every day than you are in October. Halloween took place during the 2018 fieldwork, but had already passed by before the 2024 fieldwork period and the Christmas build up was in full swing. It is possible this timing difference had an effect.

3. Different samples were used

The 2018 survey had just over 19,000 participants while the 2024 survey had just over 13,000 participants. Presumably, since they asked more questions in the second survey they saved some money by cutting back on the sample size.

That begs the question how the demographics of the two different sized samples were balanced to ensure comparability. No doubt YouGov will have made every effort to strike a demographic balance in these two samples, but that is no easy task. There is no gold standard for ensuring a group of people are equally likely to go to church or not, so there is a possibility the samples had an effect. The sample picked people and weighted the sample to achieve an equal mix of age, gender and ethnic diversity. That would help, but if there were other differences in the demographics, such as a mix of social classes or a bias between urban and rural, these would have a significant impact on the likelihood of church attendance but would be very invisible in the YouGov methodology.

In Professor Voas's article he explains the problems with the sampling methodology YouGov used for the Bible Society study. While the ideal methodology is to randomly select individuals to take part, YouGov's method is to recruit a self-selecting group to take surveys with the offer of financial compensation. From this group, basic demographic characteristics are equalised to try to make sample groups more representative of the general population, but the selection method means that they are unlikely to be genuinely representative in all aspects. Professor Voas explains:

Gold standard social surveys are based on random (probability) samples of the population: everyone has a chance to be included. The British Social Attitudes survey is one such example – and found that churchgoing fell by nearly a quarter from 2018-23.
By contrast, people opt in to YouGov’s survey panel and are rewarded after completing a certain number of surveys. The risk of low-quality or even bogus responses is considerable.

Passing the sniff test

There are some anomalies in the Bible Society data which indicate a problem with the samples which should make us stop and think. Take the number of people reporting that they go to church 'Daily / Almost Daily'. In 2018 the result for 18-24 year olds was 0%, as we would expect, but it jumped to 2% in 2024. The equivalent figure claiming attendance 'a few times per week' also jumped from 1% to 7%. At face value, an incredible increase. That single data point has contributed enormously to the narrative that it is the young who are behind a jump in attendance, almost itself explaining the total jump in monthly attendance reported. But if we are honest it is simply not credible to believe by extrapolation from the 28 people who ticked the 'daily / almost daily' box (that is 2% of the 1,400 sample in that group) and the 98 people who ticked the 'a few times a week' box that there are now almost half a million 18-24 year-olds attending church almost every single day. If we are to believe these numbers, the average demographic in church for daily prayers through the week would have more 18-24 year-olds than any other age group. Is it a coincidence that these answers were the top two in the list of answers? It seems to Mouse a more credible explanation that the people being paid to fill in the survey just ticked a box high up the list without reading it properly or caring much what they were ticking.

On Radio 4's More or Less programme, 'The Undercover Economist' Tim Harford posited several possibilities to explain the anomalous data. The 2018 survey could have been an ‘outlier’ poll with attendance coming out too low. The 2024 poll could have been an ‘outlier’ poll in the other direction. It is possible that a sudden upswing genuinely has happened late in 2024 after the denominational counts had taken place, and other data is yet to catch up with the sudden and dramatic turnaround. The conclusion was that more data is required.

But Mouse wonders what the response to these two surveys would have been if they had shown an unexpectedly large decline in church attendance. Presumably, Church commentators would have analysed the methodology, compared the results with other authoritative sources and concluded that it was a rogue poll. What a shame similar rigour has not been applied in this case.

As for Mouse, sadly he feels that the most likely explanation for the unexpected report of rising church attendance is that there is a bit of bias in the surveys for the reasons outlined above, and a few self-selecting survey responders didn't bother to answer very honestly.

Mouse clings on to some hope that this instinct is wrong and there genuinely has been a sudden and unexpected cultural shift, but none of the explanations he has yet heard have convinced him, and the evidence to the contrary is strong.

If you'd like to read the data yourself, the YouGov data tables are available here and here. You can also read the Bible Society's ~~response to criticisms of their survey~~ FAQ's here.

29 May 2025

Mouse recently confessed to someone that he was sceptical that a quiet revival was underway in the UK, and the response he got was a frustrated, "Don’t you believe in Jesus?"

So here I am making my confession. I’m The Church Mouse and I’m a ‘quiet revival sceptic’. But I still have hope.

In case you have missed it, the ‘quiet revival’ is the title of a report from the Bible Society that has made the stunning claim that the Church in England and Wales has, despite everything we have previously believed, experienced dramatic growth in recent years.

The most extraordinary claim is that, in the past six years (i.e., since just before the pandemic), the Church in England and Wales, across all denominations, has grown by more than half, from a total of 3.7 million regular worshippers to 5.8 million. The report says that it is largely the young who are driving this, in contradiction to our previous assumption that every generation is less religious than their parents.

The evidence for these claims comes from a large survey undertaken by a highly respected polling organisation, YouGov, that whether they had attended a church in the past month, among other questions. The same question set and methodology six years previously reveals a 56% increase in attendance.

And none of us noticed.

Reaction has largely been one of joy, mixed with anecdotes supporting the conclusions and speculation as to the reasons.

‘I had noticed more people attending recently, so it has the ring of truth about it!’

‘Young men are increasingly in search of purpose.’

‘Gen Z are much more spiritually open than previous generations.’

This is the sort of thing that church social media is full of.

Numerous articles have been written to explain this growth. We have been treated to explanations of how Gen Z is simply a different sort of human being from Gen Y or us oldies of previous vintages. Apparently, they are more open to spirituality and not burdened by old assumptions around faith. We are told that they don’t have the same sense of hope that previous generations had, so they are searching for new sources of meaning and purpose, and it is the young who are fuelling the growth.

So let Mouse unpack what this survey is actually saying and then form a view, to the extent that we can from the available evidence.

Firstly, the survey is not a measure of the number of people who have attended church regularly. It is a measure of the number who said that they have attended church regularly. Those are not the same things, and we must test whether there is a gap between actual attendance and claimed attendance before going any further.

Pollsters have long experienced the phenomenon of inaccurate responses in political polling. Perhaps most famously, the 1992 general election was widely predicted to be a Labour win. When the Conservatives secured a 21-seat majority, the pollsters looked at their numbers to work out what went wrong. They had accurately reported how people told them they would vote, and their samples were representative. But they coined the term ‘Shy Tories’ to explain the phenomenon. Some felt a sense of social embarrassment in telling someone they intended to vote Tory, so they either said ‘don’t know’ or declined to respond. They have since learned to make adjustments for this type of thing.

When it comes to polling on church attendance, no such methodological rigour exists. The polling firms can only report what they are told by members of the public and aim for samples that are large and as demographically representative as possible. So the minimum this survey can tell us is that more people are claiming to go to church than was the case six years ago.

This Mouse would be absolutely overjoyed if this turns out to be the reality, but let me set out a few (evidence-based) reasons why he finds it hard to believe.

Some of the churches where the Bible Society reported significant growth actually count the number of people who walk through their doors, and the numbers don’t match.

The most robust data set by a UK denomination is from the Church of England. Each church counts the number of worshippers during the same period each year, and the numbers are compiled to create a robust, consistent data set. The data shows that over the past six years, the Church has shrunk by between 10-20%, depending on how you count it.

Some commentators have responded that the Church of England is the exception, not the rule. Mired in conflict over sexuality and having high-profile sexual abuse cases in recent years, we should simply ignore the Church of England. The growth is elsewhere, we are told.

The Head of Research for the Bible Society, Dr Rhiannon McAleer, has made this argument.

“Some churches, like the Church of England and Methodists are very good at counting attendance within their churches and these data sets clearly show decline. This is picked up in the media and extrapolated to the wider picture, when it is not necessarily a fair indication of what’s going on in many denominations and churches who don’t collect attendance statistics.”

But that is not what the Bible Society report says. We can see in the data exactly what they are reporting for the Church of England. They are reporting significant growth.

According to their data, 41% of the English and Welsh Church attendance in 2018 was in Anglican settings. Based on a total regular attendance of 3.7m people, we can calculate the Anglican attendance at around 1.5m. By 2024, Anglicans had reduced as a proportion to 34% but of a much larger reported attendance of 5.8m people, so we should be seeing an increase in attendance of around 500,000 to around 2m. In other words, the report claims that the Church of England has grown by a third since 2018.

The Church of England has a range of measures of attendance, but even its most favourable measure of the ‘worshipping community’ is 8% smaller in 2024 than it was in 2018. By stricter measures, such as the average Sunday attendance, the CofE is more like 20% down, despite small increases in numbers since the pandemic lows.

Mouse notes that the Bible Society report includes Wales, however, the Anglican Church in Wales reported attendance of just 26,000 in 2018, so it is safe to assume the vast bulk of these numbers are from the Church of England.

The same methodology can be applied to the data for the Catholic Church, the next largest denomination. The report said that it has grown from 23% of attendees in 2018 to 31% in 2024, meaning it would have grown from around 850,000 regular attendees in 2018 to 1.8 million in 2024, spectacular growth of almost a million regular worshippers.

The Catholic Church in England and Wales reported regular mass attendance down around 20% from pre-pandemic levels, to 555,000 in 2023 from 702,000 in 2019.

Between them, these two denominations have reportedly grown their regular attendance by almost 1.5m people, out of the total reported growth of 2.1m, or over 70% of the total growth. But Church attendance data simply does not back that up.

If we are to take seriously the claims from the Bible Society / YouGov report, someone must come up with a plausible explanation for how it shows growth in attendance of 1.5 million people in denominations whose own statistics show decline.

It is certainly possible that there has been growth in other denominations, but when we have good reason to believe that over 70% of the growth claimed by this report is non-existent, it is hard to believe that the overall picture is anything like the headlines.

Mouse is a little frustrated that the actual questionnaire and data tables from YouGov are not available. That is not to suggest anything is being deliberately hidden, but for anyone looking to understand the data better, this would be invaluable. There may be a better way to understand the numbers, but Mouse cannot work out what that is. There may be more nuggets to be mined from the data tables if they are available, but for now, Mouse has to draw stumps at this point.

So where does this leave us?

Mouse’s take is that it is far from clear that more people are attending church than was the case in 2018, based on actual data from the two largest denominations in Britain. More solidly, we have pretty firm grounds for believing that nothing like the 56% increase is happening in reality, even if there is some growth in some places.

It is perhaps most interesting that people are claiming they attend church more frequently, even if they aren’t actually doing so in practice. For some time there was a bit of a social stigma in certain circles about religiosity. The New Atheist movement had created a hostile environment by arguing that religious faith was the preserve of the ignorant and needy. Many felt the need to move their faith into the private sphere in the face of this. That has largely died away. Perhaps the ‘Shy Christians’ are prepared to say what they really think more now.

But Mouse would conclude by zooming out a little on the macro trends. Church attendance and religious affiliation in Britain has been on the slide since before the Second World War. This has been well evidenced in church attendance data and robust surveys, such as the British Social Attitudes Survey and the Census. Perhaps it will turn around. Perhaps it has already started to do so, but Mouse urges that we not underestimate the depth and profundity of the social forces that have been driving that decline for the past century. Patterns of behaviour learned and passed on from one generation to the next have changed. New habits, behaviours, attitudes and beliefs have replaced core assumptions of previous generations. Turning this round will not be driven by a TikTok meme or a passing fad.

Facing into these uncomfortable truths is not a lack of faith or hope, but simply a recognition of the reality in which we live. In fact, it is only by facing this truth that we can have hope that we will turn it around. This Mouse still has hope, but it remains a hope in things we have not seen.

10 February 2025

Mouse was intrigued by newspaper reports of a new survey claiming to have found that Gen Z are the most spiritual generation and the least committed to atheism. The claims looked compelling but need a deeper look.

Just in case you've been able to miss the deluge of excited Christians sharing the news, Mouse is referring to an opinion poll survey of 10,000 people in the UK which has found that the generations appear to be becoming more spiritual. The survey was first reported in The Times, which headlined that Gen Z were half as likely to consider themselves atheist as their parents.

The survey has been pounced on by some Christians, eager to demonstrate that the current generation of young people are open to conversations about faith and suggesting that this might be the prelude to a revival in the UK.

Well. Perhaps.

The first alarm bell for Mouse was that the survey, with an impressively large sample size, is not actually available for us to review. We don't know the exact questions asked and we are not able to see the data tables behind the headlines. We don't know how the data was collected or the demographic breakdown of the sample. Mouse is always suspicious of a survey when he can't see the exact wording of the question asked or the actual data.

The second alarm bell is that the survey was conducted for the purposes of publicising a book - The Devil's Gospels, by Christopher Gasson. So what we're evaluating here is a survey where we can't see the questions or answers, which was constructed to generate publicity.

Nevertheless, let's take a look at the information that is available from this survey with an open mind. Gasson has written up his key conclusions from the survey in a stand alone report. In the introduction, Gasson writes:

I expected the data to confirm what has been assumed for a long time: Britain is steadily becoming a more atheist country. The results are the reverse of what I was expecting.

Mouse would suggest that Gasson's expectations were somewhat out of line with most of the recent evidence, if that was the case. There has been no evidence of increased atheism for a long time. That said, the evidence has strongly indicated a growth in 'nones' - those affiliating with no religion.

However, Gasson's data does appear to have a counterintuitive conclusion. It appears to show that younger generations consider themselves more spiritual and more religious than older generations. This leads to the paradoxical conclusion that despite the nation becoming less committed to religion steadily over time, younger generations are becoming more committed to religion than older generations.

Now, Mouse will suspend his suspicions that some of this may be caused by the exact nature of the questions asked and take the finding at face value. How can this be true?

In 2022 a survey asked the UK population about belief in God, heaven and hell and came to another paradoxical conclusion - that younger generations were both less religious than older generations, but also more likely to believe in heaven and hell.

It was a puzzle that the Policy Institute looked into in a fascinating article by David Young, who asked:

Is this due to a rise in people with unorthodox combinations of beliefs, shunning organised religion but believing in eternal damnation? That may be an intuitive solution – but it’s not the answer.

Young's solution to the puzzle was a simple analysis of demographics and the impact of immigration. In essence, the younger the generation the increasing proportion of the population is made up of first or second generation immigrants, who come from relatively more religious backgrounds than the UK population into which they have settled. As Young explains:

later generations do include a higher proportion of people from immigrant backgrounds (a person was classified as having an immigrant background if either they described themselves as an immigrant or described both their parents as an immigrant), though this has actually levelled off in Gen Z, which is probably only because the Gen Z cohort is still too young, with birth years between 1997 and 2012, for many Gen Z adults to have immigrated to the UK from abroad, compared to preceding generations.

In particular, Young showed how the increased British Muslim population amongst younger generations moved the needle on belief in Heaven and Hell. While the headline showed that Gen Z were more likely to believe in Hell than any other generation, this is not true when Muslim respondents were excluded.

So what has Christopher Gasson discovered in his survey?

The increased religiosity and 'spirituality' of Gen Z are most likely not a fundamental change in values of younger people, but more likely simply reflect that a greater proportion of this generation come from more religious immigrant families.

Many Christians assumed that the increase in 'spirituality' could be a stepping stone towards commitment to faith. But it is more likely that it is, in fact, a stepping stone in the other direction. Children of immigrant parents who come from a religious background are less likely to follow the faith when they are growing up (and trying to fit in with their mates) in a society which is largely faithless.

It is possible that this demographic phenomenon explains the whole of the effect that Gasson has found. Or perhaps there is an element that young people are more open-minded than older people. After all, Gen Z are aged between 11 and 26 - the ages when teenagers and young adults are discovering themselves and finding their own way in the world. This may explain why the report claims that younger generations are much more likely to have taken a greater interest in religion and spirituality in recent years.

Mouse is not without hope that there will be a change in the direction of travel with regard to faith in the UK. But he is not yet convinced that he is seeing it happen. The best evidence appears to simply show that the reason for changing beliefs in the generations is due to demographic changes. As David Young concluded, "The pattern we see in Gen Z emerges not because of changes in the combinations of beliefs held by Britons, but changes in the composition of who Britons are."

30 March 2026

24 November 2025

18 August 2025

29 May 2025

10 February 2025

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