When The Guardian reports that UK Bible sales reached a record high in 2025, you know something is shifting in the culture. “It’s younger people seeking some sort of spirituality,” reads the headline of the piece based on research conducted by Christian publisher SPCK Group. Just ten years ago, this kind of story would have been unthinkable. So what is it about the Bible that is proving attractive to young people today?
Allow me to suggest three reasons. The first is that the Bible resists superficial political binaries. By and large, young people today feel disillusioned by our hyper-polarised media landscape. On both sides of the aisle, public discourse frequently descends to the level of childish insults, vain stunts, and petty grievances. Against this toxic backdrop, Scripture offers a refreshing alternative.
The Christ of the Gospels is such a captivating figure in part because He cannot be pigeonholed into our narrow partisan categories. His message is neither right-wing nor left-wing, or rather, it is a bit of both. Just read Luke 16, which in the same breath castigates the wealthy for their neglect of the poor and warns that selfishness leads to hell. You do not hear many free-market capitalists reciting the story of the rich man and Lazarus these days, just as you do not hear many progressives affirming the reality of eternal hellfire. For young people seeking a politics that is more balanced yet no less radical, Christ’s insistence on the seriousness of sin combined with His compassion for the most vulnerable offers a rare and appealing synthesis.
A second reason for the Bible’s surging popularity is that it provides a compelling roadmap for life. Every healthy civilisation needs stories and heroes: stories to remind us of our origins, heroes to embody our highest ideals. For centuries, the Christian West located its foundational stories and heroes primarily in Scripture, but no longer. The inevitable result has been a profound sense of cultural deracination. Our decaying post-Christian civilisation no longer knows where it came from or what it is for.
Viewed from this perspective, Sacred Scripture offers hope. “For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope” (Rom. 15:4). Perhaps this helps to account for the immense popularity of Jordan Peterson’s lectures on the Bible. In a society that tells us our lives, our bodies, and all of reality are ultimately meaningless, young people are yearning for something more. The Bible answers that yearning, and the fact that the books it contains are sometimes complex or obscure only enhances its appeal.
Si comprehendis, non est Deus, wrote St Augustine. If you can comprehend it, it is not God. In other words, if every verse of the Bible made perfect sense to us, we would rightly suspect it of being just one more example of shallow, self-serving religion invented by human beings. Instead, Scripture invites us into a posture of awe before the divine mysteries. It is this attentiveness to the transcendent that promises light to our minds and a peace that passes all understanding. St Thomas Aquinas called Sacred Scripture a medicine for the soul, not because it offers a quick fix to life’s problems, but because it contains the healing power of God.
The third, and most fundamental, reason why Gen Z is drawn to the Bible is because it is true. Reading the Scriptures allows us to make sense of why the world around us is at once so beautiful and yet so broken. We begin to understand, too, why the idea of the “happy ending” is so deeply ingrained in our hearts. We want everything to end well in our books and films because we know that anything less would be an inaccurate account of ultimate reality. Against the nihilistic currents of our day, the Bible reminds us that history remains, at its heart, a divine comedy. It is the story of repeated human failure met by unwavering divine faithfulness, offering consolation to sinners in every age.
J. R. R. Tolkien once observed, “There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits.” Sacred Scripture presents us with the greatest story, and indeed the greatest history, ever told. As growing numbers of people in our culture are discovering, it is truly the inspired word of God, written so that we might encounter the incarnate Word who became flesh and dwelt among us. Little wonder, then, that a new generation finds itself exclaiming, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures?” (Luke 24:32).
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