Is the UK seeing a Christian revival?

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Speaker 10 Hello, and welcome to More or Less, your weekly guide to the numbers in politics, in religion, and in everyday life.

Speaker 11 And I'm Tim Harford.

Speaker 10 This week, is church going making a comeback in the UK?

Speaker 15 How many people have the government sent home because they have no legal right to be here?

Speaker 19 Is it really true that every day a thousand people begin claiming personal independence payments or PIP?

Speaker 14 Can a Spiffy New Telescope really see golf balls on the moon?

Speaker 21 And have you ever died in a fall? I know I have.

Speaker 8 Tim?

Speaker 24 But first.

Speaker 10 Is church going making a comeback in the UK?

Speaker 27 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.

Speaker 15 It's been much discussed since.

Speaker 19 The survey apparently showed that church going had dramatically increased between 2018, a previous survey, and 2024.

Speaker 11 From 8% of people going each week then to 12%

Speaker 9 now.

Speaker 1 Or, as one Christian publication put it, church attendance soars 50% as faith surges among British youth.

Speaker 14 That would be quite the turnaround, as both Christian belief and church-going have been in long-term decline for decades.

Speaker 12 But while resurrections are firmly on brand for Christians, not everyone is convinced.

Speaker 29 Our Pews News correspondent Tom Coles has been looking into it.

Speaker 13 Hello, Tom.

Speaker 8 Hey, Tim.

Speaker 11 So if you're a Christian, I guess this is potentially really exciting news.

Speaker 14 So do we know what is driving the apparent increase in church going?

Speaker 8 In saying you go to church Tim, it's not the same thing.

Speaker 17 Surely people wouldn't lie about that.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 Research from the US using cell phone data suggests that while 30% of people say they go to church every month, only 20%

Speaker 18 actually do.

Speaker 19 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?

Speaker 8 Yeah, probably.

Speaker 25 Although the actual proportion of people saying they're Christians didn't change between the surveys.

Speaker 25 So if there was an increase, it would be because the faithful are more active rather than there being more believers.

Speaker 16 But even with the caveats?

Speaker 25 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...

Speaker 25 Okay, take this summary from the Bible Society's website.

Speaker 7 In 2018, just 4% of 18 to 24-year-olds said that they attended church at least monthly. Today, this has risen to 16%,

Speaker 7 with young men increasing from 4% to 21%

Speaker 7 and young women from 3 to 12%.

Speaker 28 So, in a few short years, the proportion of young women attending church has quadrupled and young men has quintupled?

Speaker 21 I mean, that is huge.

Speaker 19 It seems a bit unlikely.

Speaker 14 But this was a big survey by a respected survey company, so what do you think is going on?

Speaker 25 Well, look, when you get a survey result like this that goes against what you'd expect, you'd ideally want some more evidence.

Speaker 25 And when you look for that other evidence, it doesn't back up what the Bible Society survey says.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 And very importantly, the main Christian denominations conduct and publish their own attendance counts every year.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 11 Wait, so the churches themselves aren't reporting increases in attendance?

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 19 Well, this sounds like a pretty open and shut case.

Speaker 30 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.

Speaker 11 There's enough evidence to suggest that it might just be a rogue survey result.

Speaker 12 They do happen.

Speaker 27 Maybe it's better to wait for more evidence.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 27 To be fair, it was basically illegal to go to church for a bit and that is going to affect attendance.

Speaker 25 Fair point.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 One other thing is that the Bible Society figure of 8% attendance for 2018 was strangely low.

Speaker 25 The Social Attitudes Survey found 12% church attendance that year, which is obviously significantly higher, and that number fell to 9% in 2023.

Speaker 25 So maybe the strange result isn't the second Bible Society survey that everyone's so doubtful about, but the first Bible Society survey.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 We need to see the 2024 data for the Social Attitude Survey to check that theory, though.

Speaker 28 I think it would be odd to call that a revival, though.

Speaker 15 And it does feel a bit like we're looking for arguments to fit the evidence.

Speaker 30 And there's nothing absolutely concrete that backs up this idea of a big increase in actual church attendance compared to before the pandemic.

Speaker 21 No.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 33 Absolutely. And

Speaker 33 we will see that this was within a range. But I am confident that it is indicative of a trend.

Speaker 10 So there's not really an answer to this.

Speaker 15 Rhiannon has faith in youGov's methods.

Speaker 30 David is a doubting Thomas.

Speaker 10 And you, Tom?

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 But there are enough things going on that I'm really curious what will turn up as the evidence gets better.

Speaker 29 I am all in favour of curiosity.

Speaker 9 Thank you very much, Tom.

Speaker 19 The big political news story this week has been the government's policy on access to the Personal Independence Payment, or PIP.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 14 These conditions can be anything from ADHD or autism to arthritis or Down syndrome.

Speaker 19 The maximum payment is £187 a week, but only a third of recipients get that much, most receive less than £100.

Speaker 29 The payment isn't linked to employment, income, or wealth and is untaxed.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 35 A thousand people a day go on to Pip. That's a city the size of, for example, Leicester, year after year after year.

Speaker 14 A thousand people per day.

Speaker 30 Many, many, many of you wrote in to ask whether this number could possibly be true.

Speaker 19 To find out, we spoke to Louise Murphy, a senior economist at the Resolution Foundation.

Speaker 30 We started off by asking if Pat McFadden was exaggerating.

Speaker 31 When we look at the government statistics on people being awarded PIP, that does look to be true.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 37 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?

Speaker 31 Yes, so we can know a little bit more about who these people are and, for example, what their main medical condition is.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 31 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%

Speaker 31 of people who claim PEP have what is broadly categorised as a mental health condition.

Speaker 21 So out of the thousand people a day beginning to claim PIP, about 360 are claiming for a mental health condition.

Speaker 31 So we can see the range of different conditions that people are claiming for.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 30 Louise says there's an increasing number of people particularly young people whose claims relate to ADHD, autism or learning disabilities.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 19 These young people don't count as new claimants because they're already in the system.

Speaker 34 So they aren't part of the thousand per day stat.

Speaker 19 But a large proportion, Louise says four in five, are claiming support for these reasons.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 20 PIP was introduced by David Cameron's coalition government in 2013 and was supposed to save £1.4 billion

Speaker 14 a year relative to the previous system.

Speaker 19 At the time, the plan was to reduce the number of eligible claimants by 28%,

Speaker 9 but instead of falling, the number of claimants rose.

Speaker 19 And by 2019, PIP was being paid to 2.1 million people.

Speaker 10 So do we know how many people are claiming PIP today?

Speaker 31 So in total, when we look at people claiming PIP, that currently stands at around 3.8 million people in receipt of that benefit.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 19 Do we know how many people are coming off PIP every day?

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 31 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%.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 19 Thanks to Louise Murphy of the Resolution Foundation.

Speaker 9 So what is driving this upward trend in PIP and other disability benefits?

Speaker 8 Well, how long have you got?

Speaker 18 Actually, don't answer that because even if you have the time to explore all the complexities, I'm afraid we don't.

Speaker 19 However, our friends on the briefing room do.

Speaker 29 They are focusing their whole program on this very issue on Radio 4 this week.

Speaker 14 They're broadcast on Thursday at 4pm and Monday at 8pm.

Speaker 1 And of course, they are also on BBC Supper.

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Speaker 29 Loyal listener Dave wrote in after spotting a startling claim from an American fitness guru on on YouTube.

Speaker 19 Here's Jeff Cavalier himself narrating a recent workout routine aimed at older subscribers.

Speaker 4 They fall at night in the dark, especially as we get older. One person every 20 seconds dies by a fall.

Speaker 21 One person every 20 seconds.

Speaker 9 That certainly sounds like a lot. Then again, falls are a constant risk.

Speaker 13 I myself once died in a fall.

Speaker 40 It's to step out here onto the roof of White City, where the more or less flag flies proudly during each series.

Speaker 37 Wes, could you give me a hand, please?

Speaker 42 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.

Speaker 5 Don't worry, I've been clambering over this roof since I was a boy.

Speaker 41 Really? Yes.

Speaker 41 Just need to.

Speaker 41 Get him in.

Speaker 2 Hayek!

Speaker 40 Hmm, interesting.

Speaker 42 Two seconds, 20 meters. It looks like you're right all along, Tim.

Speaker 8 Tim?

Speaker 11 Ah, 2011.

Speaker 27 It was a bad year for falling off roofs on Radio 4, two in one year.

Speaker 19 Clearly a lot for one radio station.

Speaker 24 But Jeff Cavalier wasn't really worried about radio roof falls, but the serious issue of falls among the elderly.

Speaker 13 One person every 20 seconds sounds a lot, but there are 8 billion people in the world after all.

Speaker 40 So what do the numbers tell us?

Speaker 22 We couldn't work out the source of Geoff Cavalier's claim.

Speaker 10 According to the World Health Organization, 684,000 people die from falls each year.

Speaker 19 That is, more than one a minute, but not one every 20 seconds.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 27 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.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 8 So, wear safety equipment when you're up high, and when you're at ground level, be sure to practice your tai chi.

Speaker 11 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

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 45 What a contrast. We've got the flights off, we've got the flights off, 19,000 people removed who shouldn't be here.

Speaker 46 On border security, Yvette Cooper's deported 24,000 people since she became Home Secretary.

Speaker 11 Robert Cuff, the BBC's resident statistician, is here to unravel a mystery.

Speaker 8 Hello, Robert.

Speaker 14 Hello, Tim. And the mystery is why was the number 19,000 in some quotes and 24,000 in others?

Speaker 47 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.

Speaker 24 Fair enough, so what's the problem?

Speaker 47 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.

Speaker 47 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.

Speaker 47 For example, the government had indeed recorded 19,000 returns by February.

Speaker 28 Robert, I'm loath to criticise a colleague's language, but recorded 19,000 returns is a bit clunky, isn't it?

Speaker 27 So let's be specific.

Speaker 16 Do you mean that these people returned home from the UK or that the government returned them?

Speaker 8 Yes.

Speaker 18 Which one?

Speaker 8 Well, both.

Speaker 47 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.

Speaker 24 So some of the people the government are claiming to have deported are actually returns who might have gone under their own steam?

Speaker 28 Exactly.

Speaker 47 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.

Speaker 47 And some voluntary returns involve government assistance, like paying for a flight or money towards resettlement costs.

Speaker 47 But in other cases, people decide to leave the UK and the Home Office returns team don't even realise they've gone.

Speaker 47 These departures may only come to light later through checks against visa or flight records, for example.

Speaker 29 So, some of the people the government are claiming to have deported

Speaker 30 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.

Speaker 8 Exactly. Wow.

Speaker 21 So, how many?

Speaker 47 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.

Speaker 24 So deported is flat wrong.

Speaker 16 They're not all being wrestled onto planes in the dead of night.

Speaker 47 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.

Speaker 11 And when you put all this to the Home Office, what did they say?

Speaker 47 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.

Speaker 21 Okay.

Speaker 16 So they create the environment that encourages people to leave once their visa is up.

Speaker 30 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?

Speaker 10 Doesn't make sense to me. Me neither.

Speaker 47 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.

Speaker 27 Robert Robert Cuff.

Speaker 21 Thank you very much.

Speaker 27 Here at Morales, we are used to fact-checking claims that seem out of this world.

Speaker 10 And sometimes they are literally that.

Speaker 11 For example, here's the Today programme discussing the capabilities of the new Vera Rubin Observatory Telescope in Chile.

Speaker 6 It's so high definition, it could see a golf ball on the moon.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 14 But is this claim even true?

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 25 Before we get into these pesky facts, the Rubin Observatory, what is it?

Speaker 39 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.

Speaker 39 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.

Speaker 39 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

Speaker 39 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.

Speaker 39 I've been waiting for this observatory for many, many decades. It really is going to revolutionize the way we look at it.

Speaker 11 I'm getting the excitement loud and clear, but the key question is, can it see a golf ball on the moon?

Speaker 39 Oh, alas, no.

Speaker 39 Sadly, sadly not. It cannot see a golf ball on the moon.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 9 So I'm curious, how did these golf balls get on the moon anyway?

Speaker 39 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.

Speaker 11 Thanks to NASA, we have some audio from that momentous occasion.

Speaker 36 One small putt for a man, one giant drive for mankind.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 14 Although in many ways it is convenient to have a breathable atmosphere, it isn't good for visibility.

Speaker 39 So everyone will know the wonderful nursery rhyme: twinkle, twinkle, little star.

Speaker 39 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.

Speaker 39 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.

Speaker 39 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.

Speaker 40 That's quite impressive but the moon is is definitely more than 10 miles away.

Speaker 39 Yeah 239,000 miles away.

Speaker 11 So how big would it need to be?

Speaker 14 Could you build one that could see a golf ball on the moon?

Speaker 39 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.

Speaker 11 So it would need to be five kilometers across in space.

Speaker 11 That seems big.

Speaker 39 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.

Speaker 39 So impossible.

Speaker 43 Hard. Let's just say hard.
Yeah, very hard.

Speaker 30 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.

Speaker 10 Our thanks to Catherine Heyman.

Speaker 9 And that's all we have time for this week.

Speaker 22 But never fear, we do have a shorter Saturday podcast available for download.

Speaker 26 Just search for more or less behind the stats.

Speaker 22 For your delectation, BBC Sounds offers cautionary tales with Tim Harford.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 13 We will be back next week.

Speaker 16 Until then, goodbye.

Speaker 29 More or less was presented by me, Tim Harford, and the producer was Tom Coles, with Nicholas Barrett, Lizzie McNeil and David Verry.

Speaker 14 The production coordinator was Brenda Brown.

Speaker 29 The programme was recorded and mixed by Gareth Jones, and our editor is Richard Varden.

Speaker 48 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.

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Speaker 48 The drama podcast that tells the history of the CIA from the inside out.

Speaker 48 Starring Ed Harris, Johnny Flynn, and me, Kim Cottrow. Ms.

Speaker 26 Page, such a pleasure to meet a real American.

Speaker 48 Listen to Central Intelligence Series 2 first on BBC Sounds.

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