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A YouGov survey showing a significant rise in church attendance in parts of the UK has been withdrawn after some respondents were found to be fraudulent.
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, particularly among young people.
But YouGov, which carried out the research in 2024, said on Thursday that the data sample was flawed, with “a number of respondents who we can now identify as fraudulent”.
The pollster’s chief executive, Stephan Shakespeare, said: “YouGov takes full responsibility for the outputs of the original 2024 research, and we apologise for what has happened.
“We 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.”
The report had claimed 12% of adults in England and Wales were attending church once a month or more in 2024, which YouGov described as “a significant increase from 8% in a previous 2018 study”.
The data also purported to show a rise in young people’s attendance, from 4% of 18- to 24-year-olds attending monthly in 2018 to 16% in 2024.
The Bible Society said it had “repeatedly sought and received assurances from YouGov, regarding both the robustness of the methodology and the reliability of the report’s conclusions” and was “deeply disappointed that YouGov not only made an error but also that it only discovered this so recently”.
The organisation said it was only told earlier this month that YouGov “confirmed 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”.
The Bible Society insisted there remained “a very positive story to tell”. It said in the past year, “we have seen an unprecedented public conversation about Christianity, with countless stories of a spiritual awakening among Gen Z”.
The chief executive of Humanists UK, Andrew Copson, said the withdrawal of the data was “both validation and vindication”.
“We need to be absolutely clear: there is no revival of Christianity in Britain,” he said. “For almost a year, Humanists UK has taken a rational, evidence-based approach, repeatedly and rigorously explaining why the Bible Society’s claims do not stand up.”
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 “self-selecting”.
“YouGov 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,” he said.
Voas said this led to “bogus respondents” as people can claim to be and do whatever they want. Additionally, he said, the method was susceptible to “survey farmers”; people in the global south could complete these surveys en masse for a small monetary reward.
AI also posed a significant issue, Voas said. “AI 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.”
He said: “The numbers simply didn’t 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’ve admitted basically it was without foundation.
“It is extraordinary that here we don’t even have to rely on surveys. We can rely on attendance counts done by the denominations themselves.
“This 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.”
A snapshot of the Church of England’s latest annual Statistics for Mission report, showing attendances for 2025, is due to be published in coming weeks.
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.
