Last year there was great excitement in Christian circles in Britain and elsewhere when a new report was published called ‘The Quiet Revival’. Based on a huge poll by YouGov, it seemed to show a very big increase in regular church attendance among young people in just a few years, from 4pc to 16pc. Unfortunately, that report has now been pulled because of flaws in the YouGov poll. Can we now conclude that there has been no quiet revival after all? Not so fast because there is evidence, independent of that poll, showing that a growing number of young people are indeed being drawn to religion.

For example, bible sales in Britain are up 106pc since 2019. That’s big. In Ireland, bible sales are at their highest level in over 10 years. In 2024, almost 30,000 were sold. This is an 11pc year-on-year increase.

Nielsen Bookscan, which monitors book sales, has said this points to “a growing interest in spirituality among younger generations”.

The Catholic Church in Britain is seeing a rise in non-infant baptisms. The Tablet reports a 21pc rise in the number of baptisms of people over the age of seven, with more baptised in 2024 than ‘in any other year in the 11-year period for which data is available, by a considerable margin’.

The number of adults receiving Holy Communion in England and Wales for the first time in 2024 increased by 44pc.

The Church of England has also reported an increase in adult baptisms, while 57pc of Baptist churches in Britain have experienced a growth in membership.

In the US, the New York Times has just reported on Catholic dioceses across the country experiencing a big increase in adult baptisms.

For example, the Archdiocese of Detroit has received 1,428 Catholic converts which is its highest in 21 years. The Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston has seen its highest number in 15 years. Des Moines diocese saw a 51pc jump last year, while the Archdiocese of Washington received is receiving 1,755 people this Easter, its highest in a long time.

In France and Belgium there have also been big increases in the number of adult baptismal candidates.

Here in Ireland, the Archdiocese of Dublin has seen a big jump in Catholic converts.

Last year, The Iona Institute published the results of two polls from Amarach Research (here and here) examining general attitudes in the population on both parts of the island towards religion and the Church.

The polls were not seeking out what young people per se thought about religion, but they both found the same thing, namely a greater openness towards religion among the 18-24-year-olds than among any other age group apart from the over-65s.

Then we had the recent report from the Catholic bishops called ‘The Turning Tide? Recent Religious Trends on the Island of Ireland’. It looks at the two Amarach polls plus data from the European Social Survey and finds some evidence of a ‘quiet revival’ among some young people.

It says that young people “have not, so to speak, been ‘inoculated’ by weak or dead strains of cultural Christianity against ever catching a ‘live strain’. This might then allow a small subset to encounter Christianity as something genuinely new and exciting”.

Is there is general religious revival taking place in society? There is not. Older Christians will continue to die off, and nominal Christians will increasingly identify as ‘nones’, but a smaller number will decide that Christianity offers a sense of meaning, purpose and community that is lacking elsewhere and can be found in churches that are best set up to offer young people beautiful liturgy and strong, Gospel-based teaching.

The numbers we are seeing are still small, and will likely remain quite small, but they do point to a trend, and the trend is up, for the first time in a long time.

(Picture via OpenArt AI).