James Marriott

speaker

547 appearances 7 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 31 Aug

James Marriott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 5.

Appearances

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Radical · Gen Z and God: Is the Church Answering Young People's Prayers? (Lamorna Ash) · 30 Jul 2026 podcast

50 years ago, I think the Christian church in Britain, the Anglican church, was almost the definition of the establishment.

My sense is that people just don't see it that way anymore.

Maybe that is why it feels a little bit more like an option.

The thing that really struck me when I was writing about this was that Christianity suddenly had this almost exotic appeal that things like Buddhism had once had to people in the 1960s, perhaps, that people were just finding in it something that felt really alien.

I mean, I guess looking at a nun on TikTok, that does seem like completely outside the way that you would live.

I guess it's maybe worth clarifying what exactly we're talking about here because there was a feeling for a while, and when I wrote my piece this came up a lot, that there was this thing called the Quiet Revival, that we were getting more and more Christians and there was a genuine movement of young people converting to Christianity that was statistically measurable and you could see that X percent more people were going to church.

I think those statistics have been somewhat debunked and rolled back now.

What exactly is the movement we're talking about here?

Is it a revival of interest?

Is it a kind of cultural thing?

How would you describe the phenomenon that we are talking about here?

How good a metric do you think your book is for wider trends about Christianity?

Do you think it can tell us anything about what's going on in Christianity today?

Or is it just individual stories?

And if it is just individual stories, what can people who aren't Christians get out of it, do you think?

I do think there's a definite striking cultural change, which is that when I was about 16 years old, to my considerable embarrassment, I was an incredibly fervent atheist.

And I thought Richard Dawkins had presented us with the answers to absolutely everything.

And everyone's going to become an atheist.

And this was a monodirectional thing we were never going to go back on.

That was a kind of movement known as the New Atheism.

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