One thing is for certain: it’s neither quiet, nor a revival.
The term is now everywhere in the Christian discourse, the UK Bible Society released a report from some research they’d conducted that claims there has been a notable uptick in the number of young people, especially Gen Z men, attending church.
That data has been challenged by many, because they claim it doesn’t reflect what they see in their context. The thing is, whether the numbers reported bear much relation to reality (I think there are good questions to ask here about the stats), what we do see everywhere is a notable shift in the level of curiosity and interest among those in their twenties when it comes to Christianity and the Bible.
Those who give away Bibles are doing so in record numbers. The general mood has shifted with the wind: we don’t need to be embarrassed by the Bible anymore. Hopefully we never were, but some of our brothers and sisters did manage to sound a little bit like they were. This change in tone isn’t just happening in the UK, all across the Western world we see similar things happening—though with some key local differences—our American friends call it ‘the vibe shift,’ which is probably a better name for it. That claim is, I think, empirically verifiable. I recently saw some claims from Alpha that this isn’t just a Western phenomenon: interest in exploring Christianity is on the up, everywhere.
My church in a sleepy town in the English shires notices (small numbers) of people in their twenties turning up at church, curious, with minimal Christian background and seemingly no Christian faith. Every church I talk to has similar stories.
The ‘quiet revival’ isn’t quiet, it must be the most talked about thing in Christian circles since that report was published, and the trend was noticeable before it was named. Neither is it a revival. People define that term differently, but I can’t think of a meaningful definition that this vibe shift fits. We get very excited about this sort of thing, forgetting that Jesus’ ordained means of growing the Kingdom is the Church, her gathered worship, and the means of grace.
So, what’s going on? Some Americans point to Trump’s win as the mood shifted in 2024. I don’t think that works as an explanation for what appears to be a notable, but not enormous, global phenomenon. I suspect if the effects are connected at all then Trump is a symptom rather than a cause. It’s certainly true that there is a political conservatism wound up in some of the ‘revival,’ though there are also right-wing progressive elements to it. Some of this is just people noticing that the Bible has a politics. Some of it isn’t. Some therefore have described the ‘quiet revival’ as a purely political movement: I think this is patently untrue. Spent time talking to those turning up in your churches and you’ll notice that while they tend more conservative, that isn’t why they’re there.
I suspect it’s more likely that one of two things (or both of these things) are happening.
The Meaning Crisis
We’ve spent the last decade talking about the meaning crisis. We seek meaning because humans are meaning-making creatures. We need meaning, or as I usually describe it, we need stories; stories are how we carry and inculcate meaning into what Charles Taylor calls the social imaginary. Unfortunately, the stories we tell each other can’t bear the weight we need to give them. The challenge is essentially that the bonfire of metanarratives that we sometimes call ‘postmodernism’ left us rootless and without stories that can bear the weight of human triumph or human sorrow. Having done away with our Christian roots we frantically sought other sources of meaning that we could frantically stuff into the holes left by the foundations we dug away.
Unfortunately, much like a famous story told by the world’s most famous storyteller, we replaced our foundations of rock with foundations of sand. This left us with the meaning crisis.
The last few years have seen this story that I’m telling get more press, including a small but notable string of intellectuals who argue from secular means that we have lost something and that maybe we need to regain it. Tom Holland, Louise Perry, Paul Kingsnorth, Mary Harrington, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Niall Ferguson, to name a few. It’s notable how many of them are now attending church regularly (all of them) and how many have become Christians (most of them). We could pick other names where that isn’t true, but a subset of those searching for roots, for meaning, among those who lamented the loss of our Christian foundations, found that meaning in those same foundations again.
While it’s not the typical use of the term, there is something in unearthing what we had collectively forgotten that we could call a ‘revival.’ Of course, the Church has been here the whole time, and most people don’t seem to be able to look beyond the national church to the majority of Christians in the UK who have been diligently telling their neighbours this for decades.
The ’quiet revival’ is, plausibly, a story of meaning lost being found again.
It’s also plausibly a story of metamodernism. This story isn’t so positive.
Metamodernism
What came after the late modernism that we sometimes call ‘postmodernism’? One group of philosophers finger ‘metamodernism.’ I’m not an expert in this, by a long shot, but the shift towards a popular culture that is brighter, suffused with something that looks like hope but is actually nostalgia, and an earnestness that’s tired of irony.
However, the thing about metamodernism, as I understand it, is that ‘oscillation’ is the centre of it. It’s a moment that can freely move between postmodern irony and despair on the one hand, and modern earnestness and idealism on the other.
Which is to say, it’s really all about the vibes. The ‘quiet revival’ is a vibe shift. For some this is leading to a search, and discovery, of meaning in Jesus. For others it is exactly what it sounds like: it’s vibes. It’s a shift of a way of being in the world; it is just as rootless as what went before it.
That could be concerning, I don’t think it should be. We should be alive to things that take the form of Christianity without its driving power (the death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ), but this isn’t the first one of those we’ve seen in the last few years. The difference is that this one would quite like to LARP as Christian. The good thing about LARPing as Christian is that that’s a great way to become a Christian: live like something is true and you will start to believe it. Do that, you might just meet Jesus for real.
Perhaps its just vibes. Even if so, that’s preferable to vibes that disdain the truth, because this ‘shift’ presents a wonderful set of opportunities to hear the gospel. So tell the truth friends, the Christ has conquered death and nothing will ever be the same again.
Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash
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