Full-fat faith: the young Christian converts filling our churches

Squeezing through the thronging and startlingly youthful crowd in search of a decent place to sit at the 11am service at St Bartholomew the Great, next to Smithfield meat market in central London, you wouldn’t guess that the Anglican Church had spent the past few decades apologetically imploding in an unregarded corner of our national life. The congregation is more than 200 on this unexceptional Sunday. A decade ago, I’m told, it might have been 50 or 60.

St Barts owes its success and a measure of online fame (one congregant drily remarks that it is something of a “meme church”) to its embrace of beautiful and traditional worship. But the young crowd is not just here for a cultural Christianity of hymns and picturesque ritual. They are remarkably fervent: genuflecting, bowing and crossing themselves. Most pray on their knees with their hands clasped together and their eyes squeezed shut.

There are signs of life at another growing church, St John at Hackney, a kind of anti-Barts with a guitar band stage, slick video projections and barista-style coffee available at the back. I sit amid a hipsterish crowd to listen to a TED-talk-style sermon sprinkled with fashionable jargon — on the road to Emmaus, I learn, the disciples were processing their trauma. I decline to wave my hands during the worship songs.

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These are two sides of the much-discussed “quiet revival” in Christian faith among young people. “Global crises sending Gen Z to church” bawled a Sunday Express front page a couple of weeks ago. The empirical foundation of the chatter is a study commissioned by the Bible Society earlier this year which found a quadrupling of church attendance among young adults, from 4 per cent in 2018 to 16 per cent now. “Something amazing is happening,” gushed the accompanying report. Young people have reversed many of the libertine trends of the later 20th century: drink, sex, social life … but atheism?

The Bible Society’s findings have been bitterly disputed — “fatally undermined by contradictory data” was the judgment of Humanists UK. Even the most buoyant Christians I speak to believe the report is over-optimistic. The idea that 21 per cent of young men regularly attend church seems, to put it mildly, unlikely.

But Christianity undoubtedly has a new energy. Last Easter, the Catholic diocese of Westminster in London welcomed 500 adult converts and the Catholic Church in France baptised almost 18,000 adults and adolescents, the highest number ever recorded. In the US the decline in church attendance seems to have levelled off. This year The Times reported that Gen Z were much less likely to identify as atheist than their parents.

Christianity’s status in public life is also much improved. In recent years there has been a trickle of prominent converts: the US vice-president, JD Vance; the former star of the new atheism movement, Ayaan Hirsi Ali; the philosopher and culture warrior Jordan Peterson is an ardent supporter of Christianity. Joe Rogan, the most popular broadcaster in the English-speaking world, announced to general surprise that “we need Jesus”. The bestselling millennial novelist Sally Rooney’s books are full of musings on Jesus (asked to recommend an underrated book in an interview, Rooney nominated the Gospels). What happened?

Fifteen years ago, in my ardently anti-religious teens and whiling away hours on the forum of richarddawkins.com (strapline: “a clear thinking oasis”), the final triumph of secularism seemed assured. In the early 2000s atheist polemics — Dawkins’s The God Delusion, Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great, Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation — sold in the hundreds of thousands and even (in the case of Dawkins’s book) millions.

It was widely held that the world was soaring ineluctably along an arc of enlightened progress. We were all destined to become richer, more democratic, more just, more rational and more secular. But those optimistic beliefs have been sorely tested in difficult recent years. Anyone tempted to simply dismiss the idea that religion could ever revive may not grasp how dramatically the cultural and economic landscape inhabited by young people has changed.

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Secularism, according to academic theories of the phenomenon, is a symptom of affluence. Roughly, as societies grow richer and citizens feel more economically secure, they find themselves less in need of existential comfort, and religion wanes. But if people feel themselves getting poorer, faith can return. After the fall of the Soviet Union (which enforced a policy of state atheism), religious belief declined in the most secure and prosperous ex-communist countries such as Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and East Germany but surged in poorer nations such as Ukraine and Albania.

For a sociologist of religion on the look-out for signs of growth, it is significant that young people in Britain repeatedly tell surveys they feel economically insecure and worried for the future. Rising house prices have precipitated more and more of them to rent expensive, insecure and humiliatingly squalid accommodation. Graduate salaries have stagnated. More than half of teenagers believe they will be worse off than their parents.

Marcus Walker, the rector of St Bartholomew the Great, who has welcomed more than 100 adult converts to his church since the pandemic, thinks it’s significant that the world is a more anxious place than in the days of Dawkins’s pomp. If you’re 25, “your entire life has been 9/11, the Iraq war, the financial crash, austerity, a global pandemic and a land war in Europe”.

Meanwhile, the traditional consolations of a well-lived secular life are weakening. Romance, friendship, family and materialism figure less prominently as sources of meaning in the lives of a generation that is poorer, lonelier, less sexually active, less sociable and less likely to start a family. And in the age of the smartphone, inane short-form videos and social media doom-scrolling are undoubtedly addictively entertaining but not very profound or spiritually nourishing.

Among the young Christian converts I speak to, an overwhelming theme is a sense of disaffection with and even contempt for the triviality and banality of secular society. A recent convert at St Barts captures a widespread sentiment when he speaks of a yearning for “something huge and beautiful and awe-inspiring … for something bigger”. At a Catholic church in prosperous west London — another remarkably young congregation, many of whom snap pictures of the high altar before Mass — I spoke to Emma, 23, who converted last year, attracted by the “beauty” of the church. “Catholicism”, she says, “has been rooted for so long.”

As one influential convert, the writer and podcaster Louise Perry, 33, puts it flatly, “secularism has failed”. Once an “annoying teenage atheist”, she now attends a “happy clappy” church every Sunday with her family. Religious people, she says, “are happier, less anxious, less lonely, more likely to get married and have children… not having religion in your life is an enormous loss. I think that of all the religious options Christianity is the one which generates the greatest human flourishing.”

Another convert, Jack, 33, describes Christianity as “the rediscovery of an inheritance of which I’d been deprived”. He realised that in hard times the faith offers a “vast trove of resources to draw on that are part of the culture of the place in which I’d grown up”.

The sense that Christianity is a lost buttress of a crumbling civilisation lends much of the quiet revival an unignorably conservative flavour. The rise of Christian affiliation among Gen Z men is almost certainly related to the rise of other traditionalist beliefs among that cohort, such as a growing hostility to perceived feminist overreach. For some, this Christian-inflected cultural conservatism is gently nostalgic. For others it is radical, charged by a sense that western civilisation urgently needs to recover a more distinctive cultural identity and deeper historical grounding if it is to withstand new threats posed by Islam and the progressive left.

In a speech in parliament last month calling for a “Christian restoration” in the UK, the Conservative MP Danny Kruger insisted that Britain is founded on Christian faith as “a community of common worship”. His themes echoed arguments made by Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her essay about her conversion, Why I Am Now a Christian. “The only credible answer” to the threats of wokeness and Islam, she concluded, “lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition”.

On the online conspiracist right, conversion to Christianity — preferably conducted in as ostentatious a manner as possible — is virtually de rigueur. Recent converts include the conservative influencer Candace Owens and the comedian and alleged sex abuser Russell Brand. At rallies hosted by the far-right activist Tommy Robinson the crowd routinely chants the phrase “Christ is King”.

A crucial factor in the growing cultural prominence of Christianity is the waning influence of the mainstream media. Since the 1960s, the BBC and the traditional press have tended to promote a secular rationalist worldview. Christianity’s media presence was reduced to unglamorous niches such as Radio 4’s Thought for the Day or BBC2’s Songs of Praise. The Credo column in The Times is the exception rather than the rule in national newspapers.

Now the internet throngs with charismatic Christian voices who would never have found a voice in the old media. Jordan Peterson’s lectures on the Bible have been watched millions of times on YouTube. A couple of years ago he appeared at the O2 Arena to speak about religion — to the apparent fascination of the young audience.

The pseudo-rebellious anti-Christian pose once common in the mainstream media makes little sense to younger people. “You don’t feel the need to rebel against it because it’s not hegemonic in the first place,” says Esmé Partridge, 25, a writer and recent convert. If you’re young, the establishment is obviously secular.

Nowadays, it is precisely Christianity’s marginal status that lends it glamour and charisma, comparable perhaps to the appeal of exotic-seeming eastern religions in the 1960s. Bizarre as it may seem to older readers, “trad” Catholicism, with its mantillas, rosaries and the Latin Mass, has been a feature of New York’s edgier-than-thou hipster scene for so long it is now almost a cliché.

The contrarian podcaster Dasha Nekrasova was an influential early convert; her eye-rolling contempt for the trashiness and vapidity of secular society is a crucial part of her countercultural schtick. Catholicism, she has said, is “a very aesthetic, literary religion”. The singer Nick Cave recently suggested the most countercultural thing it’s possible to do in the modern world is “go to church”. When JD Vance converted to Catholicism, he published an essay titled How I Joined the Resistance.

Though such influencers speak to a society that is undoubtedly less Christian, it is also one that is more open to the irrational. Among middle-class young people who would once have sneered at superstition, “woo-woo” practices such as astrology and tarot cards proliferate. But perhaps the most significant change to the spiritual environment of modern Britain is the rise of Islam. Thanks to immigration from Muslim countries, young people are increasingly exposed to serious and unembarrassed displays of religious faith.

Esmé Partridge was raised in “a very secular liberal” environment but was fascinated to encounter “quite traditional Muslims” at university and the “confidence and the moral and metaphysical certainty” Islam offered them. Faith seemed to give Muslim students “much more of a grounding and a comfort with which to navigate life”.

Another young convert to Christianity, Nathan, 25, had a phase as an acolyte of Dawkins. At university he was impressed by the faith of a Christian friend, but also the Muslim students he encountered. He found it “very inspirational that they would make God such a priority in their life, even to interrupt a meal to pray”.

It’s important not to overstate the numbers of young converts attracted to Christianity. Some of Christianity’s vibrancy is down to immigration — Christian migrants from Africa and the Caribbean are far more likely to religion is important to them than the general population. A sceptical account of the “quiet revival” holds that as religion fades, it is being reduced to a core of the most committed believers.

The last census found that Christians were a minority in Britain for the first time since the 7th century. Bobby Duffy, a demographer at King’s College London, cites an analogy made by the sociologist Grace Davie to the difference between a conscript and a professional army; a faith in which “large numbers of people [are] involved whether they liked it or not” versus one “which people join voluntarily”.

At all the churches I visit there is certainly a sense of a professional army’s commitment and identity. Nobody is there out of duty. People want, I am repeatedly told, “full fat faith”, whether in the form of ritual, Bible study or strict moral codes. Freed from the responsibilities and compromises of a national religion, Christianity is rediscovering the vibrancy and energy of a subculture.

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My sense is that this subculture has most purchase among the relatively educated and culturally engaged parts of society. After all, embracing an ancient faith in a modern secular nation requires a degree of historical and cultural self-consciousness. The phenomenon is especially pronounced at Britain’s elite universities. Oxford is often mentioned as a particularly vibrant Christian scene. Stephen Foster, the rector of the popular evangelical student church St Aldates and the most buoyant of the clergymen I meet, had 1,000 people for his 10am Easter service this year; “more people in our building … than any time in the last thousand years”.

That is a remarkable story but very far from one that is being replicated in every town. Nevertheless, the fact that a phenomenon has purchase among an educated minority does not doom it to irrelevance. Sociologists have long noticed how trends and behaviours trickle down from the most educated and culturally engaged portions of the population to the rest of society. Britain will never again be a majority Christian country but Christianity’s new popularity with influencers and the educated may give it outsized influence relative to its size.

For a dry and desiccated materialist such as me it is tempting to interpret this story only in political or cultural terms — economic stagnation, technological change, shifts in the media. But it’s worth saying this is rarely how Christians see things.

Meeting converts I’m told of encounters with God, of people hearing the voice of Jesus and of transformative experiences in prayer and meditation. I suspect the supernatural side of life — not much catered for in secular rationalist democracies — is a constant of human nature, even if only for a minority. It has more room for expression now. If man is a religious animal, God may never really be banished.