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82. The Quiet Revival That Wasn't: David Voas on Faked Data and the Truth About Religion in Britain
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"I don't think that we have any solid evidence of a religious revival underway in England, or for that matter, anywhere else." — David Voas
In April 2025, the Bible Society published a report claiming church attendance in England had surged by more than 50% since 2018, with young men's churchgoing up fivefold. It made national headlines. A year later, both YouGov and the Bible Society retracted it. This episode unpacks what actually went wrong: bots and bogus respondents in online survey panels, why the data never supported the story, and what decades of solid evidence tell us instead about religious decline in Britain.
Our guest is Dr. David Voas, Emeritus Professor of Social Science at UCL, where he led the Social Research Institute from 2016 to 2020. A quantitative social scientist, he has spent his career studying religious change in modern societies, and his TEDx talk, "Why There Is No Way Back for Religion in the West," has been viewed nearly two million times.
In this conversation we cover:
- How AI chatbots, survey farming and bogus respondents undermined the survey data, and why this is an industry-wide problem, not a one-off
- The three ways sociologists actually measure religiosity — identity, practice and belief — and why they don't always move together
- Why secularisation is a generational process that plays out over centuries, and what fills the space religion leaves behind
LINKS & REFERENCES
David Voas
- UCL profile: https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/56605-david-voas
- TEDx talk, "Why There Is No Way Back for Religion in the West": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtAR_OGzlcg
- "Why Humanism Is the Future" — Humanists UK Convention 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfI7VgkDFMg
- "Is there really a religious revival in England? Why I'm sceptical of a new report" (UCL News/The Conversation, 16 June 2025): https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/jun/comment-there-really-religious-revival-england-why-im-sceptical-new-report
- British Religion in Numbers: https://www.brin.ac.uk
Mentioned in this episode
- Bible Society, "The Quiet Revival" report (retracted): https://www.biblesociety.org.uk/research/quiet-revival
- BBC News coverage of the report's retraction: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpwjxx5eyn1o
- Christian Smith, Why Religion Went Obsolete (Oxford University Press): https://global.oup.com/academic/product/why-religion-went-obsolete-9780197800737
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