When the Data Falls Away...

Why rising spiritual interest says less about revival, and more about our reluctance to surrender

For all the understandable response the withdrawal of the Quiet Revival report has generated, one thing is guaranteed. There has been a pretty noisy revival of writing about the Quiet Revival. Elsewhere I have suggested that arguing about it might get a little tiresome: revival or not, the need for the people of Christ to share the gospel of Christ is undimmed.

So, it’s with ironic breath that I’m out here adding to the noise, but I’ve found myself (and heard others) asking an important question: If the data behind the report is not reliable, what can we really say about the current spiritual moment?

But even in the asking, I wonder if that reliance on a dataset to delineate and even decide what’s real is telling. Iain McGilchrist has observed that when we depend on measurement, numbers, or abstract evidence to tell us Truth, we position the analytical left brain as master of reality. The left brain excels at analysis, detail, and categorisation, but the right apprehends reality whole, in all its relational, spiritual, and contextual depth. Crucially, according to McGilchrist, whilst today’s Western culture insists the right serve the left, both reality and we are designed opposite.

All this insistence that reality be proven by data risks reductionism. Are questions of spiritual openness, experience of God, and Christian conversion really answered by a dataset?

So, whether unreliable data leaves us able to say anything true about the current moment is an important question. But it is not the most important.

Reading the Ambience

Because on the ground, something is happening that does not depend on a dataset to be real. There is a growing readiness for spiritual conversation. Questions of meaning, purpose, and transcendence are no longer marginal. They are becoming ambient.

In universities, we are encountering more students willing to draw on a wide range of spiritual ideas without any urgency to resolve tensions between them. Elements of Christianity sit alongside other beliefs and practices. Contradictions are simply absorbed. As my friend Ash Cunningham has rightly observed, the real shift is in openness to anything spiritual. Which can be rather uncomfortable for us millennial-and-older Western Christians who have grown up feeding on rational responses to material rationalism.

I am increasingly convinced that this reflects a wider cultural shift. Thinkers such as Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm describe this as a “metamodern” moment. Certainty and scepticism coexist, and holding competing ideas together feels increasingly natural and right, rather than problematic.

Spiritual metamodernism brings a particular kind of dissonance. Hope and doubt, certainty and scepticism can coexist. Any discomfort is to be transcended such that holding mutually contradictory ideas—and practicing mutually contradictory ritual—seems a natural way of navigating the divine.

But here’s the thing: spiritual dissonance isn’t accidental. It allows exploration without commitment, keeping conclusions at a distance. In a social-media shaped world, it yields a highly curated spirituality—a marketplace of identity in which the self presents itself to God on its own terms, crucially maintaining position as sovereign chooser.

Spirituality today is certainly expansive, but it is also carefully non-surrendering.

A friend described this recently as the “Mars Hilling” of Western culture. The result is that like Paul on the Areopagus, we see a world filled with idols—new, repurposed, subtly re-paganised, but multiplying all the same, all braying their wares to the sovereign chooser self.

Responding to Dissonance

So here’s the question I’ve been wrestling with: do I grieve over this as Paul did? And do I respond as he did, by calling all to repent and believe in the one who is sovereign Lord.

I believe today’s landscape is also illuminated by Isaiah Berlin’s thought on incommensurable values—the idea that multiple, irreducible commitments coexist without full reconciliation—and this is a positive good for a sophisticated society. Mike Ovey often pointed out that whereas Berlin saw dissonance as a positive, it belies an inherent instability. As liberty, equality, justice, and mercy are held to be irreconcilably valuable, competition is unavoidable. Without a unifying principle (a monarch, or even a Lord), the openness that Berlin celebrates tends toward idolatry. Atheism inevitably collapses into polytheism, as Mercy, Justice, Equality, and Liberty take to the ring.

Which is why the past decade has witnessed a migration from marketplace of rational ideas (and ideologies) to marketplace of spiritual identity. Authority and ultimate meaning are on sale to the individual.

All of which is as old as humanity, of course. Or nearly as old. It is just one contemporary expression of the much older desire to determine for ourselves what is true and good, rather than receiving it from God. We will keep on trying to be architects of destiny when our real need is to be archaeologists of given meaning.

And yet, this posture does not go unchallenged.

What we are seeing so often in UCCF, and what so many are reporting (anecdotally!) is those moments where something breaks through. Where the question is no longer what might be true, but what must be done.

Recently one student, who had grown up overseas with no exposure to Christianity came to the UK having first encountered a Bible verse on a wall. It spoke about Jesus returning to judge but he was unable to dismiss it. If it were true, it required a response. Questions followed him to the UK, where he began reading the Bible with others. Over time, he came to faith as what began as curiosity became conviction.

Another student spent months exploring Christianity. She was drawn in, but not ready to decide. Then, over the university holidays, something shifted. She became convinced that the Bible was true, and that following Jesus meant more than continued exploration. She made the decision to follow him.

Reaching for More than Openness

Moments like these show what spiritual openness cannot do on its own.

Openness can sustain interest and generate conversation. It can lead to serious engagement with Scripture. But it cannot resolve the central question. At some point, the issue becomes less ‘what shall I choose and why?’ more, ‘who is Lord and why?’

This is where the gospel speaks on with clarity—and why we can be encouraged by all that is happening in our culture, data or otherwise! Because the gospel does not offer one option among many, nor a set of ideas to fit into an existing framework. It calls for surrender, not mere consideration.

To receive the gospel is not to exercise spiritual choice at a higher level. It is to step out of that altogether by recognising Jesus Christ as Lord, not ourselves. This is why the conversion currently being experienced among university CUs by more than one student for every day of the university year is not only a discovery, but a relinquishment.

Which brings me to my point: The withdrawal of a report does not change this landscape. If anything, it might help us see it more clearly.

There is real spiritual interest and openness. There are real conversations happening. But there is also a deep instinct to retain control by oscillating between ideas and approaches. Ultimately this is to avoid the surrender the gospel calls for.

All of which means that, whether numbers rise or fall, whether the tide is in or out, our task hasn’t changed. We aren’t called to resolve that tension for people, but to meet them within it, with an open Bible and honest answers to their honest questions.

So, when the data falls away, what remains is what has always been: A searching world, a humanity accustomed to choosing for itself and a gospel that calls us beyond both. Not simply to decide what we believe, but to bow the knee to the one who is Lord, and to hold out the life all are searching for.