In light of The Quiet Revival report showing increased openness to Christianity among young adults, Rob Barward–Symmons explores how two releases this week reveal how our cultural space has transformed over the past 25 years. 24/10/2025
Growing up in the 1990s, Philip Pullman’s magnificent His Dark Materials trilogy was a key part of my literary childhood. We follow Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry as they traverse parallel universes with their shapeshifting daemon companions, encountering witches, Texan balloonists, and armoured polar bears and wrestling with ideas of philosophy, physics – and theology. It was this final point which became contentious in my upbringing. The main villains of the piece are power–hungry Christians (though the term is never used directly) in the form of the ‘Magisterium’ (a far more direct reference to the Catholic Church) and eventually ‘the Authority’ – an angel who declared himself God, a brutal dictator worshipped by the Magisterium. Victory for the heroes comes upon the destruction of the Authority, with love and peace flowing as a result. It was this denouement in The Amber Spyglass that led my father, an Anglican vicar, to have reservations about his nine–year–old son burying himself in beautifully crafted literature with such an explicitly and assertively anti–theistic narrative.
Written prior to the major bestselling non–fiction books from the ‘Four Horsemen’ (Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens), Pullman’s works arguably set the imaginative and literary groundwork for the new atheism that dominated the early part of the 21st century in Britain. In that context, in that moment, the trilogy both reflected and further inspired a cultural moment of increased opposition to institutional religion – particularly Christianity, though inflamed with new fervour by the Islamophobic backlash to the major terror attacks of new millennium.
Yet as the latest and likely final entry of Lyra’s story – The Rose Field, the third in the Book of Dust trilogy – hit the shelves this week, we find ourselves in a remarkably different spiritual–cultural moment. It will doubtless be a wonderful piece of literature (I should clarify here that I have not even allowed myself to read reviews, as the book waits in my Audible library ready for the weekend), but an anti–theistic narrative – and the rage–fuelled older men who framed that cultural moment – feels increasingly out of place in contemporary youth culture.
Instead, it is another major release this week that may better reflect the moment we find ourselves in, and shows the shift in the spiritual and cultural landscape that has occurred over the first quarter of the 21st century.
Today, British rapper Dave released his third studio album. Titled The Boy Who Played the Harp, the name points us towards the biblical figure of David, a shepherd boy who grew to be the anointed king of Israel – and was a lifelong lyricist and harpist, wrestling through the Psalms with faith and doubt, joy and lament, glory and guilt. This is not the first time Dave – the son of a Christian pastor – has referenced David in his music, with the final lines of his debut album Psychodrama being a recording of his incarcerated brother reading the account of David’s anointing by the prophet Samuel in 1 Samuel 16. It is not simply a nod in the title, however, and Dave wrestles with faith throughout the album, opening with an experience of God received in a dream – a story anecdotally being heard in increased frequency across young adults now entering the Church, signifying a further shift away from the dry rationalism of new–atheism towards the ‘weirdness’ of experienced Christianity. The theme emerges most explicitly in the second track, 175 Months, written as a plea to a God he admits he rarely prays to, confessing his struggles and failings with faith while imploring God to look after loved ones who have died tragically young. Yet in our current cultural moment, these explorations of faith through the form of mainstream music – in particular in hip hop and rap – no longer stand out. Rather he stands in an ever–growing line of artists wrestling with their faith in public, contributing towards shifting cultural perceptions among their wider audiences.
In Autumn 2018, I was just wrapping up the fieldwork for my PhD research. Based with a youth group in a church in London, I was interested in understanding the experience of these young people, each wrestling with what Christianity may mean for them and more generally what it meant for them to be coming of age in this era of British life. Interestingly, despite access to the massive, global Christian cultural ecosystem, it was the new wave of proudly public Christians in popular culture – and particularly across rap and hip hop – that was most impactful to many. American artists such as Kendrick Lamar and especially Chance the Rapper were highlighted often, while British grime artist Stormzy’s Blinded By Your Grace, Pt 2 was viewed as so spiritually powerful that the young musicians would play it as part of the worship sessions. All three of these artists were massive figures not only to these young Christians but across their peer groups, garnering enormous mainstream success, recording best–selling albums and collecting countless awards. To see figures with so much cultural cache (and artistic ability) being so open with their faith in their life and their work, and to see their friends responding so positively, contributed to and perhaps reflected a new atmosphere in which there was developing comfort with peers being openly religious.
In the years since, it feels that this has continued to grow. Alongside the emergence of artists such as Dave we have seen across music, social media, and sports (in particular football) public figures who are increasingly open about their Christian faith, woven throughout their public lives with ease and confidence.
Around the same time as I was completing my fieldwork, my future colleagues at Bible Society were launching the first wave of data collection which would eventually become The Quiet Revival. Fast–forwarding six years to 2024, with the young people I spent a year with now aged 20–24 and able to be picked up by YouGov surveying, they now represented a generation who appear to be notably more likely to identify as Christian and attend church regularly than their immediate predecessors – including those, like me, raised in the fire of new–atheism. Beyond those who are already in church, instead of hostility, we see across these young adults an openness to religion. A third of non–churchgoers aged 18–24 say they would attend if invited, and even more remarkably close to a half (47%) of young non–churchgoers agree that it’s a positive thing for Christians to talk about their faith with non–Christians – compared to only 15%who disagree – comfortably the warmest age group. In contrast, those aged 35–54 are strongest in their disagreement.
Popular culture and public attitudes are always in dialogical relationship, and each reflect the other in their priorities. And no cultural moment is homogenous – there continues to be anti–theistic art, and even at the height of new atheism there were public–facing Christian artists. But here, Kanye West’s lines in his groundbreaking 2004 single Jesus Walks now feel as reflective of their time as the work of Pullman: They say you can rap about anything except for Jesus; That means guns, sex, lies, videotape; But if I talk about God, my record won’t get played, huh?
20 years on, as Lyra reaches her final chapter and Dave enters a new one, our society – and in particular the world of youth culture – feels in a very different spiritual space, art reflecting and feeding the movements we can see in hard data from The Quiet Revival and beyond.
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