Who is buying all the Bibles? The Guardian has reported that, according to SPCK Group, sales of the Good Book in 2025 were worth more than double what they were in 2019. Booksellers quoted in the article ascribe this to growing interest in Christianity, as a result of high-profile figures embracing or exploring the faith, which sounds eminently plausible. For example, at the height of his powers in the late 2010s, Jordan Peterson was packing out multiple venues all around the world with his extempore lectures on the symbolic and mythical significance of the Old Testament. Other prominent converts or near-converts include figures like Russell Brand, Professor Niall Ferguson, Tom Holland, Andrew Huberman, and Shia LaBeouf.

I was struck, however, by another comment in the Guardian’s write-up. “We’ve seen an increase in people coming to the Bible from scratch…They have no Christian background whatsoever. They have no grounding from their parents or from their school. Whereas most people in prior generations would have.” Such was the view of the sales director at the Church House bookshop in London. This rang true to me as an indication of a possible shift in perceptions of Christianity over the last few decades.

When I was growing up as a churchgoing child in the Nineties, there was a feeling among my friends and contemporaries that Christianity was this boring thing that your grandparents did; a system of archaic rules and tedious obligations that were part of a general apparatus of containment and control. Priests and ministers were up there with headmasters and the police and Conservative politicians as instantiations of The Man. Songs of Praise was the epitome of cringe.

This was outdated even then, of course. But nowadays, three decades on, we might be seeing a definite shift in attitudes. My sense is that because we are three or four generations removed from a predominantly Christian culture, the faith has become not a tediously familiar component of an oppressive System, but something exotic and mystical. Plausibly, that means that people are coming to, say, the New Testament parables not as hackneyed stories made dull by overexposure in primary school assemblies, but as strange, wise and unsettling challenges to conventional morality.

I am quite willing to believe that younger Millennials and Zoomers, who have barely any knowledge of the faith from their schooling or home lives, are intrigued by a very different outlook on the world from the materialist, hedonistic, and technological paradigm that governs modern Britain and the Western world in general. When I see arguments about Christianity on social media, it tends to be those of my age (42) and older who are rehashing the belligerent saloon-bar atheism that I remember from my student days at the beginning of the century. Younger folks seem more genuinely curious and open-minded, especially about the metaphysical and supernatural claims.

We are, perhaps, returning to a situation not unlike that in the early days of the church, when Christianity was a small, radical, anti-establishment religion at odds with the surrounding society, attractive to those excluded, exasperated or exhausted by an unforgiving and brittle status quo.

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Niall Gooch is a public sector worker and occasional writer who lives in Kent.

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