{"id":497260,"date":"2026-03-26T23:48:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-26T23:48:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/497260\/"},"modified":"2026-03-26T23:48:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T23:48:09","slug":"yougov-withdraws-survey-said-to-show-rising-church-attendance-in-england-and-wales-christianity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/497260\/","title":{"rendered":"YouGov withdraws survey said to show rising church attendance in England and Wales | Christianity"},"content":{"rendered":"

A YouGov survey showing a significant rise in church attendance in parts of the UK has been withdrawn after some respondents were found to be fraudulent.<\/p>\n

The poll was central to a Quiet Revival report, published by the Bible Society last year, which prompted news stories about an apparent resurgence in Christianity<\/a>, particularly among young people<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But YouGov, which carried out the research in 2024, said on Thursday that the data sample was flawed, with \u201ca number of respondents who we can now identify as fraudulent\u201d.<\/p>\n

The pollster\u2019s chief executive, Stephan Shakespeare, said: \u201cYouGov takes full responsibility for the outputs of the original 2024 research, and we apologise for what has happened.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe would like to stress that Bible Society have at all times accurately and responsibly reported the data we supplied to them. We are running the survey again with Bible Society to get robust data on this topic.\u201d<\/p>\n

The report had claimed 12% of adults in England<\/a> and Wales were attending church once a month or more in 2024, which YouGov described as \u201ca significant increase from 8% in a previous 2018 study\u201d.<\/p>\n

The data also purported to show a rise in young people\u2019s attendance, from 4% of 18- to 24-year-olds attending monthly in 2018 to 16% in 2024.<\/p>\n

The Bible Society said it had seen \u2018countless stories of a spiritual awakening among Gen Z\u2019 nonetheless. Photograph: sturti\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

The Bible Society said it had \u201crepeatedly sought and received assurances from YouGov, regarding both the robustness of the methodology and the reliability of the report\u2019s conclusions\u201d and was \u201cdeeply disappointed that YouGov not only made an error but also that it only discovered this so recently\u201d.<\/p>\n

The organisation said it was only told earlier this month that YouGov \u201cconfirmed that it failed to activate key quality control technologies that protect the sample from a wide range of errors and this undermines the reliability of the results\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Bible Society insisted there remained \u201ca very positive story to tell\u201d. It said in the past year, \u201cwe have seen an unprecedented public conversation about Christianity<\/a>, with countless stories of a spiritual awakening among Gen Z\u201d.<\/p>\n

The chief executive of Humanists UK, Andrew Copson, said the withdrawal of the data was \u201cboth validation and vindication\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to be absolutely clear: there is no revival of Christianity in Britain,\u201d he said. \u201cFor almost a year, Humanists UK has taken a rational, evidence-based approach, repeatedly and rigorously explaining why the Bible Society\u2019s claims do not stand up.\u201d<\/p>\n

David Voas, a quantitative social scientist and emeritus professor at University College London, said YouGov had used a model of online opt-in surveys that was \u201cself-selecting\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cYouGov will say to all, if you would be interested in doing social surveys or polls, please sign up, and once you do a certain number of these polls, we will reward you,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Voas said this led to \u201cbogus respondents\u201d as people can claim to be and do whatever they want. Additionally, he said, the method was susceptible to \u201csurvey farmers\u201d; people in the global south could complete these surveys en masse for a small monetary reward.<\/p>\n

AI also posed a significant issue, Voas said. \u201cAI chatbots are able to do online questionnaires and to pass themselves off as genuine respondents. This is a serious weakness of the opt-in online panel approach.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said: \u201cThe numbers simply didn\u2019t add up. They continued to stick to their guns and YouGov backed them up. So it really is quite an astonishing turnaround that today they\u2019ve admitted basically it was without foundation.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is extraordinary that here we don\u2019t even have to rely on surveys. We can rely on attendance counts done by the denominations themselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis sort of information, misinformation, is just very, very difficult to correct once it starts spreading. And the amount of effort required to correct it is an order of magnitude higher than the effort needed to disseminate it in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n

A snapshot of the Church of England\u2019s latest annual Statistics for Mission report, showing attendances for 2025, is due to be published in coming weeks.<\/p>\n

The most recent report, published last year, showed congregations had grown slightly in recent years although numbers were still below pre-pandemic levels. There were an estimated 1.02 million regular worshippers across the church in 2024, up from 1.01 million in 2023.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A YouGov survey showing a significant rise in church attendance in parts of the UK has been withdrawn…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":497261,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-497260","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=497260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497260\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/497261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=497260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=497260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=497260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}