This article is Part 2 of a three part series titled The Re-Enchanted Mission Field: Britain, America, and the Gospel After Secularism . See Part 1, and Part 3 .
I recently returned from a gathering of Christian leaders from the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in London, meeting to learn about the revival going on in England right now. You may be thinking: oh, they have OCIA numbers going up? Like us?
Yes…but you would not understand how disruptive this spiritual shift feels on the ground.
Some are calling it “the quiet revival” — but I don’t care for the term, and neither do the Londoners we worked with for a week. It is true that it is not front-page obvious: it is not in reaction to a known tragedy, or an event that draws people in over hours or weeks. It is not a singular visible national moment. People may not immediately notice, so it feels quiet. But many pastors, evangelists, and Christian leaders–and others–in England are noticing something increasingly obvious. Something is shifting, dramatically, in our youngest adult generation.
The question is how to name what is going on honestly, without exaggerating it.
The numbers are striking — and complicated
At the Alpha Leadership gathering before the Global Leadership Conference, one set of statistics received a lot of attention. The basic claim was that in 2022, a much higher percentage of young Britons identified with atheism, while a much lower percentage identified with belief in God. By 2025, each of those numbers appeared to have shifted dramatically in the other direction–an almost direct swap across a 20 point spread. You can bet that made news!
The likely source for this claim is a YouGov UK tracking survey on religious belief in Britain, specifically their ongoing “Brits’ beliefs about God(s)” tracker. That matters, because if you say “Britain has gone from atheist to Christian in two and a half years,” you are almost certainly saying too much. The YouGov survey is an opt-in survey rather than a randomized sampling, and less rigorous as sociological data. You can imagine fervent new Christians passing around the YouGov link and saying “show Britain our generation is Christian!” We don’t know that is what happened–but it is possible.
In randomized samplings, the broad trend toward secularization in the United Kingdom is very well established. The British Social Attitudes Survey, census data, Pew Research, the European Social Survey, Labour Force Survey data, and church attendance records all show decline in Christian identification, weakened institutional attachment, and rising “no religion.” But in all the opt-in surveys, the numbers are skyrocketing up. You can read a Pew Research comparison of data points and methods for Britain here.
There are other signs to interpret as well, including a dramatic rise in the purchase of Bibles in Great Britain (up 134% in six years). But buying a Bible doesn’t have to equal identifying as a church-attending Christian. It’s still very odd to see that kind of increase in one of the five most secular countries on earth.
Something important is happening. But the question is not: has Britain suddenly become Christian again? The better question is: is the secular story beginning to crack, especially among younger adults? That is a more careful question. And it may be the more interesting one for the future of Great Britain.
After the New Atheists
This is especially striking because England was ground zero for the New Atheist movement in the aughts. This was a country that displayed double-decker bus signage running throughout London in 2008–2010 that proclaimed in all caps: “THERE’S PROBABLY NO GOD. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE.”
That was a period when atheism had swagger. It looked confident, witty, morally serious, intellectually superior, and culturally inevitable. But what if that confidence is beginning to crumble?
Many of the London-based speakers, especially those affiliated with Alpha, identified what is happening as “a move of God.” On the one hand, many said that the secular narrative was shaking and beginning to crumble from the inside out. Atheism simply does not explain humanity’s yearning for transcendence, our capacity to love sacrificially, or the sense that a higher power beyond human logic is near. Secularism is failing a generation, and they increasingly sense it, and are telling others.
They may sense it better than previous generations because their parents and grandparents were not practicing, and may even have been atheists, but they lived in a time where Christianity was understood as a cultural set of customs with a mostly troubling past. Stephen Foster, vicar at St. Aldate’s Church in Oxford, described it this way: the older generations got just enough cultural Christianity to be inoculated to the power of the gospel. The gospel, he says, has a viral quality to it and spreads. But the combination of atheism claiming victory over quaint, historically problematic Christian culture made many of the older generations immune to hearing the core gospel message.
And then–when atheism was on the verge of “winning the day”–the power of the gospel rang clearly, like a bell, in a generation of young people who had no knowledge of Christianity at all. And in a world that may be approaching post-secular, the young people came.
The first proclamation as the first proclamation
Many of these churches are using Alpha as a tool that offers a welcoming space to ask questions that matter, and hear the core gospel, the kerygma. God is real, and he is love. He loved you in your messy sin and sent Jesus to retrieve, heal, teach, and save us for him through his death. He raised Jesus from the dead, and he is alive and near. He sent his Holy Spirit to empower you to live for him and share the good news in love and peace.
What Alpha seems to do well is not complicated. It makes room. It offers food. It allows questions. It creates a low-threshold space for people who may be curious, skeptical, wounded, or simply uninformed. But it also does something else: it makes the first proclamation first again.
That matters. In many churches, the first proclamation is assumed, buried, or skipped. We talk about parish life, moral teaching, social mission, community, worship style, belonging, or programs. All of those matter. But many people in the cracking of secularism need to hear the gospel itself. Not as background. Not as heritage. Not as moralism. As the first good news.
Stories from the ground
There is more than “meeting people where they are” going on here, as important as that is. Multiple pastors reported that God is moving dramatically in the hearts of young people before they even encounter them. We heard many stories of young people who knew literally nothing about Christianity and had never stepped into a church–suddenly they receiving dreams of Jesus, and then walking into a church to ask anyone they could meet what the dream meant.
We heard about young people praying in tears for their parents and grandparents, when they themselves had just met God weeks ago. In the center of Oxford — the intellectual heartbeat of the nation — St. Aldate’s Church has seen so many young people trying to get into services that the service has been streamed on a screen outside the front facade. A recent Reddit post for the Oxford community asked, “Why are all these atheists suddenly converting to Christianity?”
These stories do not replace careful sociological evidence. But they do tell us how the movement is being experienced by pastors and churches on the ground–pews are full. And they raise a question the Church should not ignore: what if younger adults are not coming back to Christianity? What if most are encountering it for the first time?
Pre-Christian, not only post-Christian
This is where the language used in England becomes important. Again and again, Christian leaders described England not only as post-Christian, but as pre-Christian. That may sound strange. Britain is not historically pre-Christian. Christianity shaped its institutions, moral assumptions, law, holidays, architecture, education, and public memory.
But at the level of lived experience, many younger people are increasingly pre-Christian. A post-Christian culture is dominated by deconstruction. It knows Christianity, or thinks it does, and rejects, resents, or dismantles it. A pre-Christian culture is dominated by the absence of God-talk. People do not know the biblical story. They do not know Christian vocabulary. They do not know what happens in church. They may not know what Christians actually believe.
And therefore, sometimes, they recognize God more clearly.
That is the paradox. A young adult in London may know less Christianity than a nominally secular European knew forty years ago. That person may not be hostile to Christianity. They may simply not know it. They are not “coming back.” They are hearing it as news.
This is why “pre-Christian” changes the evangelization posture. If people are post-Christian, the Church may respond defensively: culture war, recovery of lost Christendom, combating hostility. But if people are pre-Christian, the posture shifts toward hospitality, first proclamation, relational evangelization, explanation rather than assumption, patient formation, and encounter before moral instruction.
That shift may be one of the most important lessons England has to offer: not because Britain is suddenly Christian again, but because the gospel may be becoming strange enough to be heard again.
The better question
So is there a revival in England? Personally, I think so–and rejoice in that. But that question may not be the most relevant question for many. The question for people working for the Church in the USA is: has secularism cracked enough that spiritually hungry people are open to hearing the gospel?
And if so, which churches are ready to offer that to these religious innocents, and receive them?
Because if Britain is spiritually unsettled, the next question is not only whether revival is happening. The better question for American Christians is whether churches were prepared before revival was obvious. That brings us to Re.Vitalize Trust, empty churches, and the possibility that the Church in the United States should be preparing now.
See Parts 1 and 3 at the links at the top of the article.
