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The SkyePod - Justin Brierley
00:27:56
Justin Brierley believes there’s a surprising rebirth in the belief in God—he’s hosted conversations between people of very different faiths for years, and he think’s something’s happening, but many critics and statisticians disagree....
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- [00:00]
A
The problem is it's being used by people like Tommy Robinson as a kind of identity marker.
- [00:21]
B
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Sky Pod. I'm Sky Jutani. The show is brought to you by Holy Post Media. I'm joined today by a good friend that I haven't seen in a while, Justin Brierly. Welcome back.
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A
Thank you very much, guy. Good to be with you.
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B
As people can probably tell who don't know you, you have an accent.
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A
I do.
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B
A lovely one.
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A
That's very kind. My American friends always tell me it adds at least 10 or 20%, you know, IQ points automatically having having a British accent.
- [00:47]
B
It does. Drew, Dick and I were just talking about this. There's something about a UK accent that makes Americans want to submit. I think it's latent guilt over the revolution still. But delighted to have you back. People may probably know you best from still your years leading the Unbelievable podcast, your time at Premier Christianity. But you do a bunch of other stuff now. You have other podcasts. Your recent book, which you were on a while ago with us, about the surprising rebirth of belief in God, which we'll get into, you're co hosting the Re Enchanting Podcast and you used to do Ask nt Write anything. What other. You're hosting a bunch of stuff. What am I missing?
- [01:23]
A
Yeah, the Re Enchanting podcast is one part of what I do. I co host that first for an organization called the center for Cultural Witness in London. And that's a real joy with a co host, Bell Tindall. But yeah, the big thing in the last year or two for me, since moving on from hosting the Unbelievable show and Ask nt Write Anything, has been producing this documentary podcast series alongside the book. So it's also called the Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. And that's been really fun, doing a kind of very deep dive into this sort of rise and fall of new atheism. And then sort of looking at some of these secular intellectuals talking very differently about Christian Christianity in the public sphere and then sort of tracing some of the more recent sort of findings. People are talking about a quiet revival in the uk. So it's been fun because the book published, you know, about two years ago when we last spoke about it.
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B
Right.
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A
Kind of was a snapshot of what was happening at that moment. But then things have actually progressed quite quickly in the last two years. So it's been really interesting. It's been a real helpful vehicle to have a podcast series that I can trace in real time what's continuing to happen. So that's. That's been a big focus of my work over the last couple of years, and we've got lots of other exciting things in the wings. We're currently working on another podcast video show that we hope to launch in early 2026, which will take me back to my unbelievable roots hosting conversations between Christians and non Christians. So we're really looking forward to that as well.
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B
Well, you are uniquely gifted at being a hospitable convener of people with sometimes aggressively incongruent ideas, and that's a difficult thing to do, and you do it incredibly well, and it's equipped you to be sort of a cultural translator from secular ideas to Christian communities, and vice versa, which relates to this whole topic. We had Ryan Burge on a few weeks ago, another friend, a Holy Post pundit, statistian, researcher of all things religious trends in at least the US And I posed to him this question, is there evidence of any kind of revival happening in the US Particularly among the younger generations? There's been anecdotal stories in various media outlets here in the US about particularly young men returning to church, some being drawn to more orthodox or more liturgical traditions of the church. And Ryan and I had a good conversation. He's very entertaining, and he's quite transparent in his views. But based on the data, he essentially said there may be something happening anecdotally, but it's not yet appearing in the numbers. We don't see any shift of note within the numbers that would say, yes, there's some kind of revival going on.
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C
But there's others who are saying there's.
- [04:08]
B
Some evidence that this might be happening in the UK or in Europe, maybe even in Australia. So I want to begin there. As you're doing your new podcast, this documentary series based on the surprising rebirth of belief in God, are you seeing data that supports this actually happening on your side of the pond?
- [04:27]
A
Well, I think we are. And that's not to take away from what Ryan said, because I think there is a different picture emerging in the UK and the US and in Europe. But I mean, it was interesting because at the time the book published, and I think you may even have challenged me on this yourself, at the time that the book came out, I was calling this thing the surprising rebirth of belief in God. But lots of the critics who came back on social media were like, well, what rebirth, Justin? All the data is pointing in the opposite direction. Church decline, you know, decline in religiosity. And you know that those were the only statistics I quote in the book, I'm absolutely clear, you know, that that's been the narrative for generations, really, in the West. And yet even when I wrote the book, I was hearing anecdotal stories, things that felt surprising. It felt like a change in the atmosphere. At least there was a vibe shift. A vibe shift. That's how people.
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B
And to be fair, you are uniquely positioned to pick up on that vibe shift because of potential interactions.
- [05:24]
A
Yeah, I think because I was positioning myself in very specifically in these conversations between Christians and non Christians and having the cultural conversations I, I had just noticed. And that's really at the core of the. The book was the, the real big change from the conversation to the New Atheist era to kind of what was emerging by the late 2010s, early 2020s, where new atheism just felt like very old, very like it kind of splintered and kind of gone away, you know, as a real kind of cultural force. And it was being replaced by, you know, love them or hate them, these sort of other secular intellectuals like Jordan Peterson and. And whoever, talking much more sympathetically about Christian faith to the similar, similar demographic. You know, a lot of these young men who would have been turning up for Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris were turning up for this very different take on the value of faith, at least. So I always kind of, because I was featuring those voices on the shows and everything, I did feel like something had changed. And then I started to hear more and more about young men just turning up at church with maybe a Bible that they just bought in their hands, never even. Not even having been invited, just kind of because they'd heard somewhere from, through some social media influencer that this might be helpful. And again, sort of as sort of after the book was published 2023, that following year at Easter, I just saw report after report from church leaders I knew and trusted about really big turnout at their Easter services. And again, it's kind of anecdotal and you might be hearing, you know, just the successes and not, not from the ones that didn't see a big turn up. But again, it felt like something had changed. And then there was kind of interesting data that people were sending me of young men in Finland of all places. There've been a big rise in the last several years of young men going to church. According to a kind of some surprising data, the Catholic Church in France, very secular country, suddenly reporting a big spike in the number of adult baptisms and conversions at their east individual. And so this, I was processing all this, started to talk to Other people who work, especially among Gen Z. I had a really interesting interview with a student organization in the UK called Fusion that works across campuses across the uk and they had been sort of again, anecdotally seeing a real change in the atmosphere on campus. Gen Z students, much more open to faith, much more open to an invitation to church. So they did some polling, some data, and to their great surprise, they found that when they asked non Christian students, would you say yes to an invitation to church? Over 75% said they would. And they were just not expecting that level of response. So there were all these different data points coming in, you know, so you come on to this year, 2025, again, Easter brings lots of stories of huge turnout in churches, like historically, like churches in cities that have never seen this level of, you know, pre pandemic or whatever, never seen this level of numbers. My own church, which is not like a all singing, all dancing, groovy church, had its highest ever attendance on record at Easter this year. And, and, and again, just lots of these stories about young men especially coming through the doors. And what was really interesting in this case was that this was coming in the context of, you know, a significant organization here in the uk, Bible Society publishing a report called the Quiet Revival, which came out just before.
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B
I actually just read through it this morning in preparation for our conversation. It was really fascinating.
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A
Yeah, exactly. And they got in touch. They kind of gave early kind of preview of it because they knew that it would intersect quite a lot with the work I was doing. And I, I suppose I, even though I'd heard everything in that report, confirms what I was hearing anecdotally, I was still surprised at the numbers because this is such a big change. So for those who, who aren't familiar with it, just, you know, very quick survey of it is that the Bible Society did a BIG survey in 2018, pre pandemic, obviously, and through a very trusted polling organization called YouGov, which was a big sample size, you know, of I think around 13,000 respondents. So that is in polling terms in the UK, a very credible kind of number of respondents. And at the time in 2018, all the responses to the questions around churchgoing and religiosity were kind of very much in line with the prevailing narrative of decline. Um, so particularly among sort of 18 to 24 year olds, only about 4% saying they went to church at least once a month. So they did the same, exactly the same questions, exactly the same kind of survey just last year, 2024. And they had these remarkably different results in just six years. And so much so that they kind of went back over the number several times and weren't ready to release this until they really felt comfortable that these, these were credible figures, that they hadn't got some weird anom in the way they've done it. And, and so, for instance, in that 18 to 24 bracket, age bracket, it had gone from 4% to 16% saying that they were attending church around once a month. At least once a month. Right.
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B
And they, I remember in the question, as I read it, this excludes weddings, funerals, special events.
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A
Yeah.
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B
So it's just normal church attendance.
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A
They've done their best to kind of weed out those sorts of things. And, and, and so that's a quadrupling, you know, in six years, which is really strange now. But that was even more stark among young men and that had been less than 4% in 2018 and was now 21%. So like five times as many. So, so the researchers were very surprised at this. But they, they, they say they, they feel confident that this does represent a real sea change in Gen Z and their attitudes towards church and that kind of thing. And it was matched by other areas, you know, similar areas, belief in God, prayer and that kind of thing.
- [11:41]
B
One that stood out to me, and it makes sense that the Bible Society would want to know this is how are people engaging the Scriptures? And they found that young people 18 to 34, again, Gen Z, are far more likely in the UK to read their Bibles than Gen Xers or Boomers. And there is a stereotype older generations are more religious than younger generations. And yet they're finding young people are more interested in the Bible than older people. Now they also found that they have a lot of problems with the Bible and struggling to understand it and find it to be somewhat incredulous and on and on, but they're reading it, they're engaging it in a way that hasn't been seen in prior surveys.
- [12:19]
A
Yeah, absolutely. So all of these things were very surprising at one level. But, but again, it made sense of some of the anecdotal stuff I was hearing and seeing about, around young people around, you know, a lot of young men just buying a King James Bible out of the blue and, and looking, you know, for someone to help them understand it. You know, I have Gen Z teenage children myself and something I notice about them actually is, is that they're far more open and easy about wearing their faith on their sleeve than I ever was at their age. That it's kind of comes much more naturally to them. And they will kind of get on WhatsApp with their friends and do a Bible study together. It's not that I didn't do that when I was their age, but it's like it's, there's a real kind of just genuine openness and an interest in doing that kind of thing. I kind of follow a Gen Z sort of social media account and YouTube channel called the Way UK. It's become quite popular here in the UK and a lot of their most popular stuff is just like Bible studies that they do as kind of Gen Z young people kind of looking through Galatians or whatever. And it may, it seems weird to me, it's like that's not the way you capture young people doing a traditional Bible study. But it's, for whatever reason it's, it's interesting now. It's kind of like. Yeah, and, and I think it is, you know, again, there's, there's these interesting statistics around the increase in Bible sales in both the US and the uk.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And again, apparently Gen Z is driving some of that. So. Yeah, I was as surprised as anyone when I saw this stuff.
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B
Let's, let's start there with some of the unexpected. If you're going to see an uptick in the number of people reading the Bible or going to church, we might make some natural assumptions of how that's happening or where it's happening. And yet this, I think it's the same survey coming out of the Bible Society. It's not the churches you would necessarily expect to be growing that are growing in the uk. Here in the us we would assume, well, it must be the very outreach oriented, seeker driven evangelical churches that are seeing this influx of new people. But in the UK it's the more traditional churches, it's the Roman Catholics and in some cases the Pentecostals.
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A
Yes, but it's. Yeah, so I think it's. This is one of the interesting bits of this research from the Quiet Revival report it and I had been noticing this as well. Again, anecdotally, a lot of the young people and young men especially were being drawn towards these more liturgical, ancient forms of church. Anglo, Catholic, Eastern.
- [15:03]
B
And that's the anecdotal thing we're hearing in the US is young men are being drawn to the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church and things like that.
- [15:10]
A
And, and that seems to be borne out by, by the research as well here in the uk. So, so there's definitely been a kind of an uptick in and Especially in the Catholic side of, of young people finding real interest in that. And I've, I've expressed that in, in my book and podcast series as kind of, it's the keep Christianity weird thing. I think there's a, a real interest in the weirdness of Christianity. People aren't, especially young people aren't just looking for what they can already get in the culture. They're looking for a different story, something that is out of the ordinary, something they can kind of immerse themselves in. And I think for a lot of people there is a kind of weird attraction to that, that the, the Anglo Catholic tradition, the liturgical, the way in which it takes you into a sort of different realm. It's quite theatrical in some ways, you know, all the smells and the bells and the ritual now. But I think there's a different kind of weird and that is in the Pentecostal and charismatic tradition. And that's where there's this openness to the supernatural, to speaking in tongues, to prophecy, to experiences. And I think again, I see a real hunger in a lot of young people for that as well. And so it's. So that's the other, the other end of the spectrum where you're also seeing the growth where with the churches that seem to be potentially missing out the most, if, you know, if there are people, is. Yeah, the kind of what I've called the mushy middle. It's kind of where there's nothing, they're not really offering anything that's feels that different to the, what's already on offer in the culture. And so even if you've got a very kind of fine tuned, you know, sort of, you know, way of presenting yourself in worship and everything, it doesn't necessarily immediately attract people because I can already get that, you know, at a good cold place, I don't have to go get a kind of slightly second rate version of it at church.
- [16:55]
B
The irony of this is I'm a Gen Xer like you are. I think we're not too far apart in age. I went to seminary and was kind of cut my teeth ministry at a time when the dominant attitude was cultural relevance. You need to make the church and its worship and its offerings as seamless to the culture as possible. Use the same language, use the same music, remove the symbols, get rid of the liturgy, make the barriers to entry as low as possible and as comfortable and practical as possible. And I think it's backfired for this younger generation. And you're seeing that in the uk, I think we're seeing evidence of that here in the US let's get into some of the explanations, apart from the one we all want to be the explanation, which is there's some movement of the spirit of God that's happening and people are awakening to faith, which may well be the case, but there are other possibilities that are going on here. One is simply, and I heard Mark Sayers talking about this recently, especially in the uk, Western Europe, maybe Australia where he is, we've seen a generation where there's been a relative hostility toward traditional religion and Christianity and a lot of young people were raised in non religious, completely secular homes. And are we simply seeing a generation as we see with every generation that's reacting to what came before it? So if you grew up in a traditional Christian environment, you react by going, forget this, I want to be secular, forget God, forget the Bible, forget church. Well, now you have a generation steeped in that secularism who's going, I want to rebel. And the way I'm going to rebel and be different.
- [18:37]
A
Yeah.
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B
Is to go to church and embrace these traditional ideas. Is that, is it just the pendulum of generational?
- [18:44]
A
I suspect that is definitely a part of it and I've had that reflected to me by a lot of people. Actually. There's, there's someone, someone who's quite a well known sort of rock musician in the UK who's gone on his own sort of surprising rebirth journey for saying this was reflected to him by his Gen Z son. You know, all of me and all of my friends were raised in a completely secular culture. Atheism was the default, which made atheism boring. You know, it's not interesting. And, and so the, the, the interest, you know, becoming religious, exploring spirituality is kind of the new call. It's the, the edgy thing to do. Whereas yeah, for, for perhaps our generation or our parents generation, becoming an atheist was the edgy, you know, thing, countercultural thing to do. It's just, it has flipped. So I have no doubt that there is a kind of, those sorts of sociocultural forces are at work in this and there is an element to which the pendulum is swinging back. But I would say it's more than just that. I do think that Gen Z in particular, at the sharp end of what I call, you know, I've called in the book, in the podcast series, a meaning crisis where the loss of a shared story that the Christian story kind of represented for so many generations has resulted in people feeling lost and dislocated and reaching for lots of other stories. But which don't ultimately add up to a meaningful life. And I think there's almost, for me, I do believe that there's a spiritual dimension to this in as much as it's kind of, it's a spiritual hunger almost and thirst for a better story is actually driving a lot of these young people to try out Christianity again. And, and so for me that's, that's got to be part of the picture as well. So I wouldn't separate in a sense a move of God from the historiographical, you know, the social and historical aspects of this. I think that those two things ultimately intertwine. And you've always seen, I think you go back and study past moves of God. It's, it's intimately bound up with what's happening socially and culturally at the time as, as to why a Wesley or a Whitfield or whoever saw this tremendous move back towards God and, and so on. So I, I suspect some, it's a lot of different factors that are going into it. I mean, one thing to say is I've talked, we've talked about this quite revival research and, and you know, I heard Ryan sort of pushing back on the idea of a Gen Z revival in the US because the data doesn't seem to reflect it. And there are people in the UK pushing back on this research, you know, so I want to be clear about that. It, everyone's satisfied there's a kind of Gen Z revival underway in the uk. There's, there's actually, there's been some quite critical articles posted in response to this, especially from humanist, you know, organizations in the UK because, because the research is so stark and so surprising. It doesn't seem to sit very well alongside churches that are counting, you know, over the last few years and the numbers that they're sort of talking about now, some churches are seeing an uptick. So the Anglican Church has actually seen an increase in attendance over the last three years, but that's from a very low point post Covid. And they haven't actually got up to the level pre Covid. And so a lot of people are saying, well, 16 of young people say, say they're going to church at least once a month. That's not what the, the churches who are doing the counting are showing. And, and, and there have also been other critiques about the, the nature of the polling that, that YouGov do and so on. So I think there's an interesting conversation to be had there because I don't think it's a kind of the finished thing. And, and all, all research in the end is provisional. You, you have to wait for further research to kind of either confirm or contradict. You know what?
- [22:41]
B
And I don't want to be, I don't want to be blind to the possibility of confirmation bias here because there are those of us who would love to see more interest in religion. And when we see data that supports that, we're going to be inclined to agree with it. On the flip side, however, when you talk about those humanist groups that don't like this research and data, it's a significant contradiction to the narrative that they've been pushing for a very long time. And the narrative that they've believed in is that human civilization is progressing in one direction, away from belief in the supernatural, away from superstition, away from religious ideas. And for multiple generations now, we have seen that narrative in the data. And when suddenly you see the turn back towards belief in the supernatural, belief in God, belief in religion, in some cases, belief in really strange forms of religion that contradicts the narrative they want to be true about human history.
- [23:35]
A
Yeah, and we've all got our own forms of confirmation bias, haven't we? So we're all in the same boat in that way. I mean, it is interesting. One of the people that has written one of the most sort of widely shared critiques of the thing and it's worth reading and taking seriously his concerns. He's quite an eminent statistician, but he's an academic called David Vos, but he is, I think, a self described atheist and he is very committed to having published a lot in the area of the secularization thesis. And he firmly believes that religion in the west is on the way out. So no surprise that he would take an active interest in the sense in really questioning this very contradictory data. Now I think we have to look at those. You know, he is questioning it from an academic, statistical perspective, but it was interesting to me because one of the concerns he raises is the polling methods that you have used. And he's asking whether we can trust this particular. The problem with that argument is that the humanist organizations have been using YouGov for exactly the same purposes for years. And so they, they have been publishing data around really significant issues, stuff that's like, like life changing issues like the recent assisted dying legislation that we've been, you know, has passed in the UK. You know, their polling from YouGov they put out as absolutely trustworthy and everything. So it feels a bit like, you know, you've got to, you can't have your cake and eat it. You've got to accept that if you're going to use it for one purpose, you've got to kind of be willing to trust it in other. In other purposes. So I'm not a statistician, so I, I'm not. I'm wary of kind of, of saying too much here, but I just think, yeah, I agree there'. Of. There's sometimes confirmation bias on both sides.
- [25:23]
B
I haven't read any of Vas stuff, but it seems I am a student of history. It seems really silly and somewhat shortsighted and naive to place your chips on betting on the demise of religion. When you look at human history, I mean, even for the last hundred years, yes, we have seen a trend towards secularization in Western affluent societies. But when you step backwards and look more broadly, religion has always been part of human civilization. And even in places where they tried to stomp it out, like in communist regimes, it persists. It's a really hard thing to get rid of. So I don't know, I think it's a little bit short sighted to think that this is the trajectory without.
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A
And a lot of my book and podcast was taken up with the fact that in an ironic way, even when new Atheism did its best to stamp out the religious instinct, it just pops up in a different form, basically.
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B
Exactly.
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A
In political ideologies, in progressive ideologies, whatever. It's. It's like there's a religious element to us that you just can't stop. And we will. We'll put something in the God shaped hole, basically. Exactly.
- [26:29]
B
I forget who it was. There was some scientists or anthropologists who said our species should really be called homo religious. Yes, because that's what marks all of us, is we have this need for meaning and purpose and larger narrative. Okay, let me put forward another alternative narrative for explaining what's going on here. A lot of people have been talking about globally and especially in Western Europe, including the United States, we have seen a lot of nationalist movements rise up in recent years. More conservative nationalist movements. You mentioned France.
- [27:03]
C
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