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# When Secular Intellectuals Recommend Faith
- URL: https://thepulse.org/en/when-secular-intellectuals-recommend-faith/
- Published: 2024-05-31T08:36:31.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-06T18:36:08.000Z
- Description: Tom Holland isn’t the only agnostic rediscovering church. Justin Brierley on secular thinkers who speak about the value of faith, and why Christianity matters only if it’s true.
- Author: Justin Brierley
- Tags: Articles, #target-leaders, #topic-mental-health, #topic-evangelism

Justin Brierley is a speaker, writer and broadcaster who for years hosted the faith debate show *Unbelievable?*. In this essay for the British weekly *The Spectator*, he starts with an evening service he attended with the historian Tom Holland at St Bartholomew the Great, the oldest church in London. Holland, co-host of the popular history podcast *The Rest Is History* and author of the bestseller *Dominion*, had lost his faith by the time he was a teenager and has been going to church regularly for several years. Brierley notices that the pews are filled mostly with young professionals, not the older crowd you might expect in an Anglican church.

Holland isn’t the only one. Brierley describes a wider shift: the New Atheists of the early 2000s promised a better world once religion was gone, and in his view that promise hasn’t come true. Thinkers like Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Haidt and Louise Perry speak openly about what faith offers people and society, even when they don’t share it. A few, like the writer Paul Kingsnorth and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have become Christians.

But Brierley doesn’t simply celebrate. Faith is more than something useful for thinkers to lean on or a tool for holding a culture together, he argues, and it loses its power when it’s used for political ends, on the right or on the left. What matters is whether it’s true, above all whether Jesus really rose from the dead. He also shares how Holland describes his own spiritual journey, including a prayer during a cancer diagnosis that was later reversed, and points to a study from Finland: between 2011 and 2019, church attendance among men aged 18 to 29 more than doubled.

If you work with young people, this essay helps you understand a conversation many of them already hear on podcasts and YouTube. It’s also a good starting point for talking with older teens about whether faith is merely useful or actually true.

📖

****Read the full article:** [A Christian revival is under way in Britain](https://spectator.com/article/a-christian-revival-is-under-way-in-britain/?ref=thepulse.org) by Justin Brierley, in The Spectator.

## More from Pulse

- [Why Louise Perry Changed Her Mind on the Sexual Revolution](https://thepulse.org/en/why-louise-perry-changed-her-mind-on-the-sexual-revolution/)
- [The Role of Youth Ministry in France’s Revival](https://thepulse.org/en/youth-ministry-and-the-revival-in-france/)
- [The “Asbury Effect” of a Spiritual Awakening](https://thepulse.org/en/the-asbury-effect-of-a-spiritual-awakening/)

*This article by Justin Brierley first appeared in* [The Spectator](https://spectator.com/article/a-christian-revival-is-under-way-in-britain/?ref=thepulse.org) *in March 2024\. Pulse published a German version in May 2024 (*[in German](https://thepulse.org/de/wenn-agnostiker-den-glauben-empfehlen/?ref=thepulse.org)*).*