IF PEOPLE FEEL GOD IS BACK, IT’S ACTUALLY BECAUSE HE NEVER WENT AWAY

 

Something seems to be happening.

 

A YouGov poll in 2025, with a large sample size of 13,000 found that young people in Britain – especially young men – are showing real interest in Christianity.

 

In 2018, just 4% of 18-24 year old Britons attended church at least monthly; today this figure has grown to 16% with young men increasing from 4% to 21%.

 

A tracking poll by YouGov monitors belief in God among 18-24s in Britain and has seen this belief rise from 16% in 2021 to 45% in 2025.

 

These are, on any count, astonishing figures. What could account for them? Human beings are complex creatures and so we can only hazard some guesses.

 

The precarious state of global politics is one. We are in a much darker place than at the start of the century when the tech revolution was booming without any sense of the hazards that lay ahead and the peace dividend of a post-Cold War world was being shown in flows of goods and labour across continents. Even climate change had yet to register in the wider population. When things fall apart, people look for help where they think they can find it.

 

Accompanying these instabilities for younger people is the grievance that their future is gloomier than their parents’, with standards of living sliding and the possibility of owning property declining as house prices surge year after year. The UK, like many other western countries, is becoming an inheritocracy, where parental legacies will determine whether you become richer or stay poorer. Economic realities change, but not quickly and sometimes not at all. Younger people need to find their hope somewhere.

 

A third impact is the Covid pandemic. This universally awful, life-depriving and life-denying experience acted like an enforced retreat, giving many people space to reflect on their lives and what is important. The Great Reset began as an economic recovery plan to escape the impact of Covid worked out by the World Economic Forum. It eventually morphed into an online conspiracy theory about secret plans for an authoritarian world government. But there are signs that for some, the great Covid reset turned out to be spiritual, as they embraced God.

 

It is only anecdotal evidence, but as a bishop in the Church of England I confirm people who want publicly to express their faith in Jesus Christ and get to read their private stories of how they found that faith. They come in all ages, ethnicities and backgrounds and every story is a unique one of how they encountered God. Among them in recent years has been a recurring theme of how the pandemic led them to think about the big questions of life: why we are here, what we want to believe in and how we want to live.

 

There is also the issue of online accessibility. Though we decry they way the internet leads people to believe what is not true, it also provides rich information for people to figure out the world around them, if they can find reliable sources. In Jesus’ time, some were anxious about seeking him out for fear of what others would say. Nicodemus sidled up to Jesus in the darkness of night to ensure people wouldn’t talk about it (not that this worked, clearly). Today the Nicodemus generation who want to know more about the Christian faith but who quite understandably do not want to cross a church door to find out, can go online to research faith and even watch its practitioners in worship at livestreamed services. I encountered one young man who came to faith (in the pandemic, as it happens) who used search engines to find out more about the different global religions and chose to follow Christ as a result. Even Google, it seems, can lead people to the Lord.

 

Naturally, there will be other cases where people have lost their way or their faith precisely as a consequence of the forces just described. People do not act in uniform ways to the stimuli they experience. What the limited polling evidence referred to here suggests is a growing interest in the Christian faith in the UK. We are moving swiftly away from the apparent hegemony of the new atheists at the start of the century, who posed a two dimensional caricature of God and proceeded to demolish this. God cannot be wished away or disproved away. God is not back, because he never went away.