For Christian booksellers, the good news about Bibles sales has been few and far between. But in recent retail figures, there was a revelation.

Sales of the good book reached a record high in the UK in 2025, increasing by 134% since 2019 – the highest since records began – according to industry research. Last year, the total sales of Bibles in the UK reached £6.3m in 2025, £3.61mup on 2019 sales.

The sudden uptick of interest has caused booksellers and scholars to ask some profound questions of their own, such as where these newly curious readers are coming from and whether faith, or another more modern phenomenon – namely social media influencers – have called them to the word of God.

“We’ve seen an increase in people coming to the Bible from scratch,” says Aude Pasquier, retail sales director at Church House bookshop in Westminster Abbey.

“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.”

“It’s definitely younger people who are seeking some sort of spirituality – they want to understand the world and themselves better,” he said.

Steve Barnet, owner of St Andrews bookshop in Buckinghamshire, believes that same search for spirituality is setting some young people on a path which starts with online personalities such as Jordan Peterson – the conservative Canadian influencer – and leads to religious texts such as the Bible.

“[Peterson] is not a Christian, but through him, a lot of people are going on a spiritual journey. Some are ending up in church, some are ending up elsewhere. Some are ending up in a good place. I would think ending up as a Christian in church is a good place.”

Barnet has personally observed a new “surprising” clientele of young men entering his shop. “Almost out of the blue something’s changed where people are turning to faith,” he says.

For some young people, the spiritual journey starts with online personalities, such as Jordan Peterson, and leads to religious texts, says Steve Barnet. Photograph: Chris Williamson/Getty Images

The research was conducted by Christian publisher SPCK Group. It analysed data from the Nielsen BookScan, a service that compiles the sale data of books across the globe.

The study also suggests that religion is one of the fastest growing nonfiction genres, with an 11% boost in sales in 2025, an increase from 2024, when sales grew by 6%. Last year, the bestselling Bible translation was the English standard version published by Crossway.

The upward surge in Bible sales in the UK correlates with the growth in church attendance in England and Wales in previous years. According to a report published last year by the Bible Society, the number of people attending church in England and Wales has risen by 50% since 2018.

Leading the charge is young people. Just 4% of 18 to 24-year-olds said they attended church monthly in 2018, but in 2024 that number rose to 16% – the largest increase out of any age demographic.

Sam Richardson, CEO of SPCK Group, notes that these findings are indicative of a changing tide where the appeal of Christianity has emerged as a “counter-cultural” force, particularly for younger generations in the UK, who have grown up in more secular family and social environments.

“The rebellious thing to do was to be an atheist and follow people like Richard Dawkins and the new atheism which used to be very popular. Now, I think things are reversed. For the next generation it’s more interesting to be a Christian, they’re open to exploring that rather than being automatically closed against it,” says Richardson.

“As we face worldwide political and social change, including the after effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, global wars, the rise of AI, and a growing mental health crisis, individuals are re-engaging with questions of meaning and spirituality.”

Richardson also considers social media as an instrumental factor that has made Christianity more “accessible” to young people. “There’s lots of ways that people can have visibility of other people’s spiritual journeys in a much more personal way than was done 20 years ago where you might have to turn up at church and listen to whoever’s in the pulpit.”

The Bible Society report also highlighted that it is men who are more likely to go to church than women, suggesting that this widening interest in Christianity has been spurred by younger males specifically.

The trend is also echoed in the US, where Bible sales reached a 21-year-high in 2025. Similar to the US, a brand of Christian nationalism leveraged for political gain has now become part of the UK political discourse. At a Unite the Kingdom carol service in December, far right figure Tommy Robinson stood beneath a banner which read: “Jesus saves”.

However, leading figures in the Church of England were quick to denounce the “co-opting or corrupting of the Christian faith and symbols to exclude others.”

Richardson says that peaking church attendance and Bible sales predates the development of a Christian nationalist rhetoric. “It has probably been overplayed as a factor,” he says. “There’s definitely something going on, but it seems very recent that Christian nationalism has really started to get attention, whereas this increase in Bible sales has been sustained for six or seven years since 2019.”