Is the UK seeing a Christian revival?

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

Want to stop engine problems before they start?

Pick up a can of C Foam Motor Treatment.

C-Foam helps engines start easier, run smoother, and last longer.

Trusted by millions every day, C-Foam is safe and easy to use in any engine.

Just pour it in your fuel tank.

Make the proven choice with C Foam.

Available everywhere.

Automotive products are sold.

Seafoam.

I'm Brett Ski, and you're in California, and I'm here to tell you about SpinQuest.com, my favorite social casino.

With over a thousand slots and table games, absolutely free with the ability to win real cash prizes instantly to your bank account.

There's no better time to hop on our $30 coin package for only $10 deal.

Head over today.

I love you.

I'll see you there.

SpinQuest is a free-to-play social casino.

Voidwear prohibited.

Visit spinquest.com for more details.

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

Hello, and welcome to More or Less, your weekly guide to the numbers in politics, in religion, and in everyday life.

And I'm Tim Harford.

This week, is church going making a comeback in the UK?

How many people have the government sent home because they have no legal right to be here?

Is it really true that every day a thousand people begin claiming personal independence payments or PIP?

Can a Spiffy New Telescope really see golf balls on the moon?

And have you ever died in a fall?

I know I have.

Tim?

But first.

Is church going making a comeback in the UK?

That seems to be the message from a YouGov survey for the Bible Society, a non-profit that works to distribute the Bible, which was published in a report called The Quiet Revival in April.

It's been much discussed since.

The survey apparently showed that church going had dramatically increased between 2018, a previous survey, and 2024.

From 8% of people going each week then to 12%

now.

Or, as one Christian publication put it, church attendance soars 50% as faith surges among British youth.

That would be quite the turnaround, as both Christian belief and church-going have been in long-term decline for decades.

But while resurrections are firmly on brand for Christians, not everyone is convinced.

Our Pews News correspondent Tom Coles has been looking into it.

Hello, Tom.

Hey, Tim.

So if you're a Christian, I guess this is potentially really exciting news.

So do we know what is driving the apparent increase in church going?

In saying you go to church Tim, it's not the same thing.

Surely people wouldn't lie about that.

I'm not commenting on potential sins, but it's well established that people don't actually go to church as much as they say they go to church.

Research from the US using cell phone data suggests that while 30% of people say they go to church every month, only 20%

actually do.

I suppose that even if people do exaggerate their church attendance, it is more plausible to expect that this increase in people claiming that they go reflects an increase in attendance rather than an increase in fibbing?

Yeah, probably.

Although the actual proportion of people saying they're Christians didn't change between the surveys.

So if there was an increase, it would be because the faithful are more active rather than there being more believers.

But even with the caveats?

Yeah, it's exciting news for Christians.

Actually, maybe a bit too exciting.

Some of the increases in claimed church attendance stretch plausibility a little bit, such as...

Okay, take this summary from the Bible Society's website.

In 2018, just 4% of 18 to 24-year-olds said that they attended church at least monthly.

Today, this has risen to 16%,

with young men increasing from 4% to 21%

and young women from 3 to 12%.

So, in a few short years, the proportion of young women attending church has quadrupled and young men has quintupled?

I mean, that is huge.

It seems a bit unlikely.

But this was a big survey by a respected survey company, so what do you think is going on?

Well, look, when you get a survey result like this that goes against what you'd expect, you'd ideally want some more evidence.

And when you look for that other evidence, it doesn't back up what the Bible Society survey says.

I've been speaking to David Vose, an emeritus professor in social science from the University College London.

He says the Bible Society survey results are completely contradicted by other surveys.

Gold standard surveys such as the British Social Attitudes Survey show that church going has actually fallen by nearly a quarter between 2018 and post-pandemic.

And very importantly, the main Christian denominations conduct and publish their own attendance counts every year.

And those show that while church going has rebounded from the lows of the COVID lockdown, it remains substantially lower than it was in 2019 before the pandemic.

Wait, so the churches themselves aren't reporting increases in attendance?

Not above pre-pandemic levels, no.

For example, the Bible Society survey finds attendance among Catholics has doubled, but the Catholic Church itself says attendance is down since 2018.

Well, this sounds like a pretty open and shut case.

I don't think I'm being devil's advocate to say that I'm starting to doubt the figures in the Bible Society report.

There's enough evidence to suggest that it might just be a rogue survey result.

They do happen.

Maybe it's better to wait for more evidence.

I mean, YouGov absolutely stands by these surveys and they say the methodology is sound, but I think given the other evidence, scepticism is justified.

Let me just be God's advocate for a second, because you can make the case that this survey could have picked up something interesting.

The first thing to note is that the Bible Society survey took place later than the other data points.

The bums on seats data and the other surveys all come from 2023.

The Bible Society is from late 2024.

And we know that church attendance has increased every year since it fell off a cliff in the pandemic.

To be fair, it was basically illegal to go to church for a bit and that is going to affect attendance.

Fair point.

At the same time, there's other international survey evidence that suggests the long trend of increasing secularization may have flattened out, with some evidence of an uptick in the proportion of young people identifying as Christian.

One other thing is that the Bible Society figure of 8% attendance for 2018 was strangely low.

The Social Attitudes Survey found 12% church attendance that year, which is obviously significantly higher, and that number fell to 9% in 2023.

So maybe the strange result isn't the second Bible Society survey that everyone's so doubtful about, but the first Bible Society survey.

If that was mistakenly low, then the second survey would show a surprising rise when maybe it's just the post-pandemic recovery to pre-pandemic levels.

We need to see the 2024 data for the Social Attitude Survey to check that theory, though.

I think it would be odd to call that a revival, though.

And it does feel a bit like we're looking for arguments to fit the evidence.

And there's nothing absolutely concrete that backs up this idea of a big increase in actual church attendance compared to before the pandemic.

No.

No, there's still a real possibility this might turn out to be an odd survey result and nothing more.

I'll put that to Rhiannon McAlier, the Bible Society's Director of Research and Impact.

While our data certainly has curiosities in it and more questions can be asked, I don't think there is enough evidence to suggest that it's totally rubbish.

The surveys are big and use an online panel designed to match the UK population in specific ways.

But it's not a random panel of the kind where you can be highly confident about the margin of error.

Now, obviously, there are unknown errors within this, but we can't measure them.

So could the figures be a bit hot?

I am really happy to say yes.

Will future data sets, future data sets nuance it?

Absolutely.

And

we will see that this was within a range.

But I am confident that it is indicative of a trend.

So there's not really an answer to this.

Rhiannon has faith in youGov's methods.

David is a doubting Thomas.

And you, Tom?

I'm agnostic, of course.

You definitely need more evidence before you should have any confidence at all that actual church going is up above pre-pandemic levels.

But there are enough things going on that I'm really curious what will turn up as the evidence gets better.

I am all in favour of curiosity.

Thank you very much, Tom.

The big political news story this week has been the government's policy on access to the Personal Independence Payment, or PIP.

PIP is a weekly payment available for people in England and Wales with a long-term physical or mental health condition or disability which makes it difficult for them to do certain everyday tasks or to get around.

These conditions can be anything from ADHD or autism to arthritis or Down syndrome.

The maximum payment is £187 a week, but only a third of recipients get that much, most receive less than £100.

The payment isn't linked to employment, income, or wealth and is untaxed.

Last week, Pat McFadden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, made an eye-catching statement about how many people are successfully claiming the benefit.

A thousand people a day go on to Pip.

That's a city the size of, for example, Leicester, year after year after year.

A thousand people per day.

Many, many, many of you wrote in to ask whether this number could possibly be true.

To find out, we spoke to Louise Murphy, a senior economist at the Resolution Foundation.

We started off by asking if Pat McFadden was exaggerating.

When we look at the government statistics on people being awarded PIP, that does look to be true.

The data is published monthly, and what we see is that in the most recent months of data, around 30,000 people are being awarded PIP each month.

So when you average that out to a daily rate, that comes out at around 1,000 people being awarded PIP each day.

So I think the government is correct to use that statistic.

I should say when we're talking about claims for personal independence payment, we're referring just to England and Wales because in Scotland, PIP is being replaced by adult disability payments.

Out of those thousand people a day on average, do we have any idea what the reasons are for their claims and the claims being accepted?

Yes, so we can know a little bit more about who these people are and, for example, what their main medical condition is.

It is worth bearing in mind that for lots of people, they might have multiple overlapping health conditions, but all that we know from the data is their main condition.

And what we see is that a rising proportion are claiming PEP for reasons mainly relating to mental health conditions.

And the latest data that was around 36 or 37%

of people who claim PEP have what is broadly categorised as a mental health condition.

So out of the thousand people a day beginning to claim PIP, about 360 are claiming for a mental health condition.

So we can see the range of different conditions that people are claiming for.

Something that we've heard a lot from the government about is a rising number of people claiming for issues relating to so-called common mental health conditions like anxiety and depression.

And when you group together lots of different things, anxiety depression PTSD for example people claiming for those reasons now account for around a quarter of all claims so that really is the biggest group of people with mental health conditions.

Louise says there's an increasing number of people particularly young people whose claims relate to ADHD, autism or learning disabilities.

There's a growing number of people being awarded PIP for that reason and in particular many of these people are children and young people who might previously have been in receipt of child disability benefits, who then move on to PIP when they turn 16.

These young people don't count as new claimants because they're already in the system.

So they aren't part of the thousand per day stat.

But a large proportion, Louise says four in five, are claiming support for these reasons.

And in total, when we look at both adults making claims for the first time as well as children being moved over to PEP from the child system, Around 150 people each day are being awarded PIP for reasons relating to autism, ADHD or learning disabilities.

PIP was introduced by David Cameron's coalition government in 2013 and was supposed to save £1.4 billion

a year relative to the previous system.

At the time, the plan was to reduce the number of eligible claimants by 28%,

but instead of falling, the number of claimants rose.

And by 2019, PIP was being paid to 2.1 million people.

So do we know how many people are claiming PIP today?

So in total, when we look at people claiming PIP, that currently stands at around 3.8 million people in receipt of that benefit.

And that's forecast to continue by the end of the decade, set to reach about 4.5 million people claiming that benefit by the end of the decade.

Do we know how many people are coming off PIP every day?

So we don't have the data in exactly the the same layout so we can't kind of exactly compare inflows each day and outflows each day but it's certainly true to say that people are staying on PIP for a longer duration of time.

What you see when you look at kind of an average claim length among a PIP claimant is that each year since 2013 the duration is increasing.

So for example back in 2013 when you looked at the proportion who were still receiving PIP a year later, that stood at around 75%, three quarters, whereas in the most recent data from 2022, that was 95%.

So the vast, vast majority were still claiming PIP a year later.

So that is another trend that we're seeing that will push up on the number of people receiving PIP.

Thanks to Louise Murphy of the Resolution Foundation.

So what is driving this upward trend in PIP and other disability benefits?

Well, how long have you got?

Actually, don't answer that because even if you have the time to explore all the complexities, I'm afraid we don't.

However, our friends on the briefing room do.

They are focusing their whole program on this very issue on Radio 4 this week.

They're broadcast on Thursday at 4pm and Monday at 8pm.

And of course, they are also on BBC Supper.

Sups!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be hosted!

Winner, best score!

We demand to be seen!

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com

What's going on, California?

It's Bluff here.

You know what's better than a relaxing day at the beach?

A relaxing day at the beach with SpinQuest.com, America's number one social casino with over a thousand slots and table games available to the comfort of your own phone with instant cash prize redemptions, and new users get a $30 coin package for only 10 bucks.

That's S-P-I-N-Q-U-E-S-T.com.

I'll see you there.

SpinQuest is a free-to-play social casino.

Voidwear prohibited.

Visit spinquest.com for more details.

Loyal listener Dave wrote in after spotting a startling claim from an American fitness guru on on YouTube.

Here's Jeff Cavalier himself narrating a recent workout routine aimed at older subscribers.

They fall at night in the dark, especially as we get older.

One person every 20 seconds dies by a fall.

One person every 20 seconds.

That certainly sounds like a lot.

Then again, falls are a constant risk.

I myself once died in a fall.

It's to step out here onto the roof of White City, where the more or less flag flies proudly during each series.

Wes, could you give me a hand, please?

Yes, I hadn't realised we'd be this high up.

Well, be careful, it's frosty.

Yes, and windy.

Perhaps this isn't such a good idea after all.

Don't worry, I've been clambering over this roof since I was a boy.

Really?

Yes.

Just need to.

Get him in.

Hayek!

Hmm, interesting.

Two seconds, 20 meters.

It looks like you're right all along, Tim.

Tim?

Ah, 2011.

It was a bad year for falling off roofs on Radio 4, two in one year.

Clearly a lot for one radio station.

But Jeff Cavalier wasn't really worried about radio roof falls, but the serious issue of falls among the elderly.

One person every 20 seconds sounds a lot, but there are 8 billion people in the world after all.

So what do the numbers tell us?

We couldn't work out the source of Geoff Cavalier's claim.

According to the World Health Organization, 684,000 people die from falls each year.

That is, more than one a minute, but not one every 20 seconds.

Or maybe Jeff is talking only about the US, where the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says Every 20 minutes, an older adult dies from a fall in the United States.

Ah, perhaps the horological decimal point has slipped, but that number also only applies to the over 65s and like them, it's a bit old from 2014.

The most recent figures for all ages show 47,026 deaths from falls in the US, which is more like one death every 11 minutes.

These are people of all ages, although someone over the age of 65 is more than five times more likely to die in a fall than the population as a whole.

While it isn't true that an American dies every 20 seconds from a fall, it is true that falls do kill a lot of people.

So, wear safety equipment when you're up high, and when you're at ground level, be sure to practice your tai chi.

Thanks to loyal listener Dave, and if you notice any mathematical missteps of your own, do get in touch at more or less at bbc.co.uk

Now returning once again to migration the government have been very keen this year to tell us how many people they have escorted out of the country 19,000 people returned by the end of last month, including the four largest to return charter flights in our country's history.

What a contrast.

We've got the flights off, we've got the flights off, 19,000 people removed who shouldn't be here.

On border security, Yvette Cooper's deported 24,000 people since she became Home Secretary.

Robert Cuff, the BBC's resident statistician, is here to unravel a mystery.

Hello, Robert.

Hello, Tim.

And the mystery is why was the number 19,000 in some quotes and 24,000 in others?

No, that's not the mystery.

It was 19,000 when Yvette Cooper was talking about this in February, and 24,000 when Wes Streeting was speaking in May.

Fair enough, so what's the problem?

What's to do with what they mean when they say returned or removed?

The Home Office records returns of people who have no legal right to be in the UK.

It could be because they've entered illegally, say on a small boat, or they've overstayed their visa or are going to be deported because of a criminal conviction.

And the numbers are broadly accurate.

For example, the government had indeed recorded 19,000 returns by February.

Robert, I'm loath to criticise a colleague's language, but recorded 19,000 returns is a bit clunky, isn't it?

So let's be specific.

Do you mean that these people returned home from the UK or that the government returned them?

Yes.

Which one?

Well, both.

Both people the government returned and people who returned themselves.

Both types get lumped in the figures, and so this slightly clunky noun, returns, is used in the official stats.

So some of the people the government are claiming to have deported are actually returns who might have gone under their own steam?

Exactly.

Returns are classified as enforced or voluntary.

And enforced might involve an immigration officer escorting someone onto a flight to make sure that they have left the UK.

And some voluntary returns involve government assistance, like paying for a flight or money towards resettlement costs.

But in other cases, people decide to leave the UK and the Home Office returns team don't even realise they've gone.

These departures may only come to light later through checks against visa or flight records, for example.

So, some of the people the government are claiming to have deported

might be returns who left entirely voluntarily once their visa was up, and then the government might only have found out about it a couple of months later.

Exactly.

Wow.

So, how many?

About a third of the total, and more than a third left voluntarily with the knowledge of, and maybe some assistance from, the government.

Only a quarter are what they call enforced.

So deported is flat wrong.

They're not all being wrestled onto planes in the dead of night.

Only a minority are and it's probably misleading to say that the government returned all of these people when a third of them left of their own free will without any assistance.

And when you put all this to the Home Office, what did they say?

Well, they said they have a direct and an indirect role in returns.

So they point to wider measures that would discourage and prevent immigration offending.

Okay.

So they create the environment that encourages people to leave once their visa is up.

But if you're going to do that, why not take credit for the millions of people who go home once their holiday in the UK is over and decide not to become immigration offenders and say that you returned them too?

Doesn't make sense to me.

Me neither.

And on the other side of the ledger, the Home Office likely wouldn't take credit for the million or more people who arrived in the UK as immigrants last year by saying that the government imported or welcomed or invited these people or indeed arrived them.

Robert Robert Cuff.

Thank you very much.

Here at Morales, we are used to fact-checking claims that seem out of this world.

And sometimes they are literally that.

For example, here's the Today programme discussing the capabilities of the new Vera Rubin Observatory Telescope in Chile.

It's so high definition, it could see a golf ball on the moon.

Extraterrestrial balls, or extraterrestrial balls, aren't exactly the thing most of us immediately jump to when we think of what to look at through a telescope.

But is this claim even true?

We called out one of the big guns to answer the question, Catherine Haymans, professor at Edinburgh University and Astronomer Royal for Scotland, and more importantly, astronomer royal for more or less, to answer this for us.

Before we get into these pesky facts, the Rubin Observatory, what is it?

Oh, it's the most amazing observatory, Tim.

It is one of the world's biggest telescopes, twinned with the world's biggest digital camera.

And it's a big international collaboration, and together we are going to be creating the first movie of the universe by taking images of the night sky on repeat.

Every three nights, we revisit the same patch of sky over and over again we build all that up it's going to allow us to see things that go whiz flash and bang in the night sky

we're going to be finding more asteroids than have ever been discovered before but also we can stack those images up over 10 years to create the deepest widest image of our universe to confront big questions about what's out there what is going on in the dark side of our universe the mysterious dark matter and dark energy And I cannot explain to you how I'm just so excited about this new observatory team.

I've been waiting for this observatory for many, many decades.

It really is going to revolutionize the way we look at it.

I'm getting the excitement loud and clear, but the key question is, can it see a golf ball on the moon?

Oh, alas, no.

Sadly, sadly not.

It cannot see a golf ball on the moon.

That's a shame, because alongside moon buggies, flags, a family photograph belonging to astronaut Charlie Duke and 96 bags of human waste, there are actually two golf balls on the moon.

So I'm curious, how did these golf balls get on the moon anyway?

Well, we have Alan Shepard, a golf fanatic who went up on the Apollo 14 mission back in the 1970s, who decided to play golf on the moon.

Thanks to NASA, we have some audio from that momentous occasion.

One small putt for a man, one giant drive for mankind.

To return to the telescope question, it turns out that one of the main obstacles to being able to see a golf ball on the moon is our atmosphere.

Although in many ways it is convenient to have a breathable atmosphere, it isn't good for visibility.

So everyone will know the wonderful nursery rhyme: twinkle, twinkle, little star.

Stars don't usually twinkle when you see stars twinkling, it's just because of the atmosphere causing turbulence in the light as it travels down to us here on Earth.

And that atmosphere makes it very hard for us to see things in high resolution.

So, no, we would not be able to see a golf ball on the surface of the moon.

The atmosphere is brilliant at the observatory in Chile, but it would only allow us to see a golf ball at a distance of about roughly 10 miles a bit further on on a good night.

That's quite impressive but the moon is is definitely more than 10 miles away.

Yeah 239,000 miles away.

So how big would it need to be?

Could you build one that could see a golf ball on the moon?

Yeah, well really really big.

So first of all let's let's go up into space.

That makes our life a lot easier.

You would need a telescope whose diameter is five kilometers across.

So it would need to be five kilometers across in space.

That seems big.

Yeah, so if you think about the International Space Station, you'd need roughly 3,000 international space stations all kind of tiled together in a circle to make the sort of the size of the telescope collecting mirror that you'd need.

So impossible.

Hard.

Let's just say hard.

Yeah, very hard.

Alas, unless we use a magical telescope that doesn't yet exist, we won't be able to see a golf ball on the moon.

Our thanks to Catherine Heyman.

And that's all we have time for this week.

But never fear, we do have a shorter Saturday podcast available for download.

Just search for more or less behind the stats.

For your delectation, BBC Sounds offers cautionary tales with Tim Harford.

And if you would like to hear why people such as Bayes, Du Bois, and Nightingale all have legendary status and statistics, head to bbc.co.uk, search for more or less and follow the links to the Open University.

We will be back next week.

Until then, goodbye.

More or less was presented by me, Tim Harford, and the producer was Tom Coles, with Nicholas Barrett, Lizzie McNeil and David Verry.

The production coordinator was Brenda Brown.

The programme was recorded and mixed by Gareth Jones, and our editor is Richard Varden.

From BBC Radio 4, the Russians will be launching a satellite sometime in the next three weeks.

I'm Kim Cottrow, back with a new series of Central Intelligence.

This is a CIA Covert Op Top Secret.

The drama podcast that tells the history of the CIA from the inside out.

Starring Ed Harris, Johnny Flynn, and me, Kim Cottrow.

Ms.

Page, such a pleasure to meet a real American.

Listen to Central Intelligence Series 2 first on BBC Sounds.

Want to stop engine problems before they start?

Pick up a can of CFOA motor treatment.

C-Foam helps engines start easier, run smoother, and last longer.

Trusted by millions every day, C-Foam is safe and easy to use in any engine.

Just pour it in your fuel tank.

Make the proven choice with C-Foam.

Available everywhere, automotive products are sold.

Safe home!