Bible Society pulls flawed ‘Quiet Revival’ report

Bible Society pulled the Quiet Revival report from its website after YouGov admitted the sample on which it was based was faulty.

The report, published last year, suggested the decline in faith among Gen Z had reversed and that there had in fact been a significant increase in practising Christians among young people in the last few years.

In a Q&A on its website, Bible Society admits the survey was flawed and asks what went wrong with the research. 

Humanists UK said they had been vindicated in their insistence there had been no quiet revival at all of Christianity in Britain.

For nearly a year, Humanists UK said, they had called on Bible Society to prove the truth of the claims. The Humanists also provided factual evidence that showed the decline of Christianity in the UK across all age groups.

Andrew Copson, chief executive of Humanists, said: “This is both validation and vindication. We need to be absolutely clear: there is no revival of Christianity in Britain. For almost a year, Humanists UK has taken a rational, evidence-based approach, repeatedly and rigorously explaining why the Bible Society’s claims do not stand up. They chose not to engage with that evidence.

“Much of the damage has already been done. Global media reports have too often and wrongly jumped on the bandwagon of a supposed Christian revival in the UK. That must stop. At a time when truth in these social questions has never been more politically important, everyone has the obligation to be rigorous in their presentation of data in the public realm and the claims they make for it.

“The UK is not a Christian country, and our politics must reflect that. If we fail to recognise the plural and mainly non-religious nature of our society, not only will we be living a lie as a country, we will be undermining our ability to work for peace and cohesion in our diverse society.”

David Voas, emeritus professor of social science at the UCL Social Research Institute, said: “I’m afraid that the Bible Society brought these problems on themselves. Experts have been telling them for the better part of a year not only that the figures are wrong, but why they were likely to be wrong: bogus respondents, repeat respondents, people overseas interested in the rewards, and other problems that infect opt-in online polls. They refused to engage with us.  I hope that journalists will be more sceptical in future: if survey findings from an advocacy group sound too good to be true, check with serious researchers.”

Bible Society said, “YouGov has quality control systems designed to exclude survey respondents who are not based in the UK, who attempt to complete the survey more than once, or who give inattentive or random answers. Bible Society was informed in early March that significant parts of these systems were not functioning correctly during the 2024 survey – the result of human error on YouGov’s part. YouGov only discovered this recently, following a thorough internal review. This meant that a statistically significant proportion of responses were of low quality or otherwise unreliable, and the data cannot now be relied upon.”

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Bible Society said it could not have spotted the error and that it exercised “exceptional care” over the research.

“We delayed publication of The Quiet Revival for three months while we investigated YouGov’s data thoroughly. Because we have an academically trained research team, we were able to interrogate the data rigorously – asking questions about weighting, the possibility of sampling error, panel drift, drop out, response bias and questionnaire effect. However, as a client we weren’t able to access the systems YouGov uses to detect ineligible respondents and had to rely on their assurances that these had been properly applied. This turned out not to be the case. YouGov has confirmed that it was impossible for us, as their client, to have been aware of the error. We were informed in mid-February that YouGov had concerns about the survey and intended to carry out a thorough internal review. Before then, YouGov had repeatedly assured us that there was nothing wrong with the data. We only learned in early March that serious failures had been found in their anti-fraud systems. After that, we worked as quickly as we could to establish the full picture before going public with a statement and correction.”

Now the society has published a new report, The Quiet Revival one year on: what’s the story? 

“The error means that we can’t rely on the YouGov data, but the amount of corroborating evidence that’s emerged during the last year means that we’re still confident that there is a Quiet Revival going on, with more young people open to faith, a greater warmth towards Christianity, and churches across England and Wales reporting their own experience of growth,” the society says, adding, “There’s plenty of other evidence that indicates that more people are finding faith today than for many years. We think that’s what the broad range of evidence suggests and we lay this out in our new report, The Quiet Revival one year on: what’s the story?”

The society will now run another survey with YouGov at the same scale as the 2024 survey, with around 13,000 respondents, later this spring. It will also run further surveys, including probability surveys, with other companies, with a view to gaining as accurate a picture as possible of Christianity and the Bible in England and Wales. “We hope to report back in the autumn.”  

YouGov said, “In 2024 we carried out research for Bible Society that showed 12 per cent of people attended church once a month or more, a significant increase from 8 per cent in a previous 2018 study. In particular, the poll showed a rise in church attendance amongst younger people.

“The 2024 survey generated considerable public attention. When it initially attracted media interest, the study’s research team went back to the data and found no methodological issues at that time.

“Due to the ongoing scrutiny this work received we have re-analysed the data using new and additional better tools and techniques. This review, carried out by our Platform and Data Sciences teams, now found that specific demographic groups particularly emphasised in this survey contained a number of respondents who we can now identify as fraudulent. This occurred at a higher rate than typical amongst other polls at the time and enough to make a few points difference to the key result. This was because some of the anti-fraud measures available in 2024 were not administered in the optimal way.

YouGov takes full responsibility for this. Online market research has come under increasing attack by fraudsters in the past several years. YouGov have greatly strengthened our procedures to defend against potential fraud using new technologies, within-survey fraud detection, identity verification, and duplicate detection. We have reduced the percentage of UK panellists who fail these tests to under 1 per cent, which we believe is among the lowest in the industry.”

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