I went to the local Catholic junior school, but I wasn’t a Catholic. I wasn’t even baptised. Every mass, I’d sit with a few others, restless in the pews while our classmates filed up for communion – a silent outsider watching a ritual I wasn’t allowed to join.
Not that it made much difference. As I grew up, it seemed most of my peers – Thatcher’s children – didn’t believe anyway. We occasionally mouthed the prayers, sang the hymns, ticked the boxes. Faith was a formality, not a conviction. We were raised in a Britain that traded meaning for materialism, taught that ambition mattered more than belief, that success was the closest thing to salvation. Religion, to us, was fading – like VHS tapes and coal strikes – relics of a world we were leaving behind. And yet, from where I sit now, in the heart of Europe, I’m watching something I never expected: Gen Z – the generation shaped by anxiety, lockdowns, and endless scrolling – finding their way back to faith. Not out of duty. Not out of habit. But because something in them is still searching.
The numbers tell a different story
In April 2025, the Bible Society released its Quiet Revival report – and the figures were surprising. Between 2018 and 2024, monthly church attendance in England and Wales jumped from 8% to 12%. That’s over two million extra people in the pews, and it’s Gen Z who seem to be driving it. Among 18–24-year-olds, church attendance quadrupled in six years: from 4% to 16%. One in five young men in this group now attends church monthly. For years, we told ourselves young people were too cynical, too secular, too busy scrolling TikTok to care about God. Turns out we were wrong. This isn’t nostalgia for Christmas carols and harvest festivals. The new believers are filling Catholic parishes, Pentecostal halls, and grassroots evangelical gatherings – not necessarily the ageing Church of England. Britain’s religious map is shifting, and the momentum is coming from below.
Pandemic, anxiety, and the search for meaning
So why now? Part of the answer is brutally simple: chaos. COVID-19 tore through the fabric of everyday life just as Gen Z were coming of age. Isolation, anxiety, the feeling that nothing is certain anymore – these weren’t abstract ideas; they were daily realities. When the institutions around you feel hollow, faith starts to sound less absurd and more necessary. A Church of England survey found that 56% of 18–34-year-olds have prayed – more than older generations. For a supposedly secular cohort, that’s astonishing. And they’re not praying because they’re bored; they’re praying because the world feels broken. Mental health crises, eco-anxiety, culture wars – sometimes hope has to come from somewhere higher. In this fragile environment, faith offers something rare: stability. A story bigger than yourself. A community that doesn’t cancel you for asking stupid questions. For many Gen Z Brits, church isn’t about rigid dogma; it’s about survival – emotional, spiritual, and even social.
Faith as activism
The revival isn’t just happening inside churches; it’s moving outward. This generation’s Christianity isn’t about keeping up appearances – it’s activist, socially conscious, and deeply communal. Young Christians are volunteering at food banks, campaigning for climate action, and organising refugee support drives. They don’t separate faith from justice; they see them as inseparable. As one youth pastor in Birmingham put it, “They don’t just want sermons; they want to change the world.” This explains why Pentecostal and evangelical movements – often dismissed as relics of the American culture wars – are thriving in multicultural, urban Britain. They offer belonging, purpose, and action – not just ritual. It's less about standing on tradition and more about rolling up your sleeves. Even Catholic parishes, traditionally slower to modernise, are seeing new life among second-generation immigrants and socially engaged students. Christianity is becoming a badge of action, not just belief.
A double-edged sword
But not everything about this revival is sunshine and hymnals. Alongside the genuine spiritual searching, there’s a darker undercurrent. Some far-right influencers are trying to hijack Christianity as a political weapon – offering young, disaffected men a distorted, ultra-conservative version of faith. Online, it’s easy to stumble from Bible verses into misogyny, conspiracy theories, and culture war rage. We’ve seen it with figures like Tommy Robinson dressing up bigotry in Christian language. We’re seeing it now in the rise of hardline, pseudo-religious content on TikTok and Telegram. Faith is being twisted into another front in the ongoing war against “wokeness” and modernity. So yes, some young people are finding Christ. But others are finding a caricature of Him, one that has more to do with power and grievance than grace. It’s a reminder that revival doesn’t always mean renewal – and that faith, like anything powerful, can be misused.
A post-secular Britain?
Still, the bigger picture is clear: faith is back on the table. The idea that Britain would simply outgrow Christianity – that secularism would march on in a straight line – is dead. What we’re seeing instead is something messier: a post-secular Britain, where religion hasn’t disappeared but shapeshifted. Where young people don’t inherit faith automatically but seek it out. Where belief isn’t mainstream but isn’t marginal either. In this new landscape, churches that survive won’t be the ones clinging to 1950s traditions; they’ll be the ones that listen, adapt, and live out the radical call to compassion and justice that first made Christianity revolutionary. This doesn’t mean Britain is about to become a theocracy. Most young Christians still support LGBTQ rights, care about racial justice, and want an inclusive society. Their faith isn’t nostalgic; it’s pragmatic – a way to rebuild meaning in a world that feels increasingly hollow.
A hopeful twist
As someone who’s written about Britain’s drift – its Brexit chaos, its culture wars, its political cynicism – watching Gen Z quietly revive Christianity feels almost subversive. Not because they’re trying to drag us back to some imagined golden age, but because they’re daring to hope. Hope is dangerous. It’s disruptive. And in a world that’s forgotten how to believe in anything bigger than itself, it might just be the most radical thing left. Maybe, just maybe, the future of Britain isn’t a slow fade into cynicism. Maybe it’s being rewritten – quietly, awkwardly, defiantly – by a generation kneeling at the altar not of nostalgia, but of meaning. And maybe – just maybe – even those of us raised to worship ambition might find something bigger worth our time.
The author is an English tutor in Prague
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