Last year I linked to a remarkable report, published by the Bible Society in the UK. Last week, the Bible Society has withdrawn the report. What is happening?
As you can read in this statement from Paul Williams, the data provided by YouGov (the polling organisation behind the research) turned out to be faulty and the Bible Society pulled the report.
YouGov made mistakes, accepted responsibility, apologised, and they made it clear that the Bible Society could not have known that anything was wrong with the data. This does not mean that nothing can be said about the phenomena described in the initial report. It just means that this particular dataset does not support the conclusions.
How does this turn of events change the story about the ‘Quiet Revival’? In a new report The Quiet Revival one year on: what’s the story?, the Bible Society writes:
In short, we find substantial reasons to believe that:
- There is a significant change in the spiritual climate in England and Wales
- The default position on questions of religious identity is shifting from ‘Christian’ to ‘no religion’
- Cultural shifts are leading many, but especially the younger generation, to be more proactive in seeking spiritual and religious foundations for questions of identity, meaning and purpose
- Christianity in Britain is experiencing both a decline in nominal faith, and a growth in active faith
- Increased Bible sales, baptisms, reports of increased church attendance and a surge in individual testimonies all point toward substantial new conversion to Christian faith in recent years.
And they conclude:
Fundamentally, this report continues to challenge the deep-rooted assumptions of the secularisation narrative. Christian renewal, especially in the next generation, is a highly inconvenient story for those who have built their careers and organisations on the idea of the inevitability of religious decline. This is partly why the past year has seen such an unprecedented level of pushback to the Quiet Revival story.
Others have written about this as well. Justin Brierly, a well known commentator writes that, while none of these figures amounts to a “revival” (..) they are reliable data points and indicate that something is happening. And Graham Tomlin remarks that even bad data can reveal a country searching for something more.
So What?
First of all, ‘something‘ is happening and the signals, however incomplete and mixed with noise, make that clear. One of the recurring responses to the initial report was ‘this points to something that I/we have observed as well!’ That still stands, those signals are still out there, they have been amplified and the public debate has shifted as a result (at least somewhat?)
Second remark: let’s not confuse quantity and quality. The quantitative data is important, but it is not the whole story. In fact, isn’t the whole point of the story that quality really matters, for example the quality of the liturgy as an expression of the reality. This ties in with another observation, namely that quality happens in personal relations. I am currently reading the Gospel of Mark together with someone who is new to the faith, and it strikes us that Jesus frequently decides to teach a small(er) group of people, and not the large crowds.
Finally: hope. With all the corruption and darkness around us, look around you-or watch the news, we have good reasons to be pessimistic. But there is something hopeful about the signals that reach us, even if we don’t know yet how to filter signal from noise. Hope is counter-intuitive. Hope is often hope despite all the counter-signals. Reading the new report, I realised once again that hope is not what we need most when things are obvious and comfortable. We need hope when the world is confusing and the future dark. We need it now. And, thanks be to God, we have it now. After all, it is Holy Week.
[Photo by Aa Dil: https://www.pexels.com/photo/cross-with-light-2523885/]