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.