Top Stories — Thursday, April 9, 2026
What is trending in the USA today? Here is Breaking News:
- No, Britain Is Not Having a Christian Revival — nyt News
- Amid U.S.-Iran Negotiations, Netanyahu’s Interests May Conflict With Trump’s — nyt News
- Automatic U.S. military draft registration planned by December, filing shows — CNBC
No, Britain Is Not Having a Christian Revival
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/9/2026, 10:01:05 PM
It was a researcher’s dream: a surprising finding that made international headlines.
Britain was in the middle of a “quiet revival” of Christianity, said a report published by a nonprofit last year. It cited what it called a “large, robust” study by a trusted polling company, which showed that one of the most secular countries on earth was suddenly returning to church — and Gen Z was driving the shift.
The response was anything but quiet.
The media published the findings, again and again. “Christianity is coming back to life,” a Bloomberg columnist wrote. “Young people are ‘finding truth in the church,’” The Guardian reported. “The Christian revival is here,” according to The Telegraph. Christians around the world reposted the conclusions millions of times online.
I was also intrigued by the report, so I began visiting British churches. In some, the congregations were small, and homilies echoed through near-empty chapels. But in a few London churches, particularly those that had appeared in viral videos, the pews were packed.
“People are finding the church via social media,” said Marina Saif, a nutritionist, 34, who attends a Coptic church in London that was full of young people. She said her church’s ancient liturgy and heady incense offered a welcome break from a week staring at a screen. I met American evangelicals who said they had traveled to London to support the surge, and priests who said a nationwide revival was underway.
The problem, though, is that it wasn’t.
Last month, the nonprofit, The Bible Society, retracted its report and called the underlying data “faulty.” The polling company that conducted the 2024 survey, YouGov, said in an apologetic statement that an internal review found its sample of more than 13,000 adults had contained “fraudulent” responses. Those were “enough to make a few points’ difference to the key result,” YouGov acknowledged.
The retraction has vindicated many social scientists and statisticians who had fiercely contested the original findings. But despite the reversal, and multiple national studies showing British Christianity is still in overall decline, the idea of a “revival” has taken hold, fueled by select examples of growth.
“It’s a man bites dog story. It’s completely unexpected, and it seems to be really intriguing,” David Voas, a social scientist at University College London, said of the survey results. “But it’s ill-founded.”
The misinformation had political implications: Religious conservatives pointed to the revival report as evidence that their movements were ascendant. That matters in a moment when Britain’s right-wing populist party, Reform U.K., has been using the language of Christianity to call for “civilizational renewal.” One Reform lawmaker has said Britain needs “a revival of faith” and a recovery of “Christian politics.”
In doing so, these politicians have mirrored the Republican playbook in the United States, where President Trump and his administration have also claimed, without sufficient data, that the country is experiencing a religious revival to bolster their movement.
For years, researchers have forecast that church pews would eventually empty in Britain, and in the West more broadly. In the 2021 census, for the first time, fewer than half of British people said they were Christian. Churches, once the beating heart of British villages, are closing, with more than 3,500 shut over roughly the last decade. Many have become the sites of luxury homes, weekend craft fairs and yoga studios.
The “Quiet Revival” report, published in April 2025, claimed all of that was changing. It specifically focused on England and Wales, and said that monthly church attendance there rose by more than 50 percent between 2018 and 2024, to about six million attendees. Young people were surging to church, it said, with 21 percent of young men ages 18-24 attending at least monthly.
The results shocked researchers — including the ones who had commissioned the report. “We weren’t expecting it,” Rob Barward-Symmons, one of the lead authors, told me last year. Others, like Mr. Voas, rushed to fact-check it.
Instead of using a random sample of the public, the standard that high-quality opinion polls adhere to, the study used a method called an “opt-in” survey, where people can elect to take the survey online.
That self-selection often introduces incentives that skew study results. Some people rush through the survey to finish it as fast as possible. Others may select answers at random. Additionally, there is evidence that opt-in surveys are easy for chatbots to take.
The company that ran the British religion survey, YouGov, stood by its report until last month, when it published a retraction. It said many of the responses were unreliable because “anti-fraud measures” weren’t correctly administered, and referred me to its public statement when I asked for more details.
“For journalists, it was exciting to write about. For a lot of Christian believers, it was something that they wanted to be true,” said Conrad Hackett, a demographer at Pew Research.
Christianity appears to be in long term decline in Britain, according to multiple national surveys. In one, the share of British adults who go to church at least once a month was 12 percent in 2018 and is now 9 percent. In another, 54 percent of adults in Britain identified as Christian in early 2018, and last year, that number was down to 44 percent. Fewer new parents choose to baptize their children.
Still, there are signs of growth in some churches. The Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales has reported an uptick in adult baptisms. Immigrants are helping drive growth in some evangelical and charismatic Christian congregations. And about 12 percent of Anglican churches in Britain have reported congregations that were larger than before the pandemic. But those are exceptions.
“Revival is something you wouldn’t need a spreadsheet to measure. It’d be pretty obvious it was happening,” said Justin Brierley, the author of “The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.”
There is a growing spiritual hunger in Britain, he said, though it does not always find Christian expression. Bible sales have increased in the country in recent years. Celebrities have helped make tarot reading and horoscopes into popular trends. And young people ages 18-34 are more likely to hold some spiritual beliefs, including a belief in animal spirits, than people 50 and older, Pew Research found.
Lamorna Ash, 31, spoke to young people across Britain about religion for a recent book. She said some were becoming interested in spirituality because it had been so visible on social media and in politics.
“Some see faith as a kind of countercultural phenomenon,” she said. “A way to differentiate yourself from others.” She said young people were drawn to religion because they were hungry for richer communities and answers to life’s big questions.
“These are questions that everyone has, fundamentally — questions of meaning, purpose,” Luc de Leyritz, 29, said last year while attending a service at Holy Trinity Brompton in Onslow Square, one of London’s most popular churches. It’s packed each week with young people, and he said he often arrives 20 minutes early to get a seat. “There’s a pendulum swing. The newer generation, Gen Z, is more interested in spirituality, more interested in religion.”
A growing curiosity, though, is not the same as a revival.
Lauren Jackson is an editor for The Morning and the host of Believing at The New York Times.
Read the full story at nyt News.
Amid U.S.-Iran Negotiations, Netanyahu’s Interests May Conflict With Trump’s
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/9/2026, 10:00:02 PM
When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finally spoke to the Israeli public on Wednesday night, some 18 hours after a two-week cease-fire with Iran had come into force, his televised address was less about victory than unfinished business.
The “double existential threat” of Iran’s ballistic missiles and its nuclear program has been “distanced,” he said, but not eliminated.
“We still have goals to complete,” Mr. Netanyahu said, “and we will achieve them either by agreement or by the resumption of fighting.”
He was speaking at the end of the deadliest day in Lebanon since fighting resumed last month between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed armed group across Israel’s northern border.
On Thursday, under international pressure to dial down the violence, Mr. Netanyahu said he had instructed his government to open talks with Lebanon “as soon as possible.”
The negotiations would focus, he said, on establishing peaceful relations between Israel and Lebanon, and the disarmament of Hezbollah, which is also a significant political force in the country.
Forty days after Israel and the United States launched their military offensive against Iran, life in Israel was getting back to normal. In most of the country, children returned to school after a night without alerts of incoming Iranian missiles, and the main airport resumed full operations.
For many Israelis, however, the path ahead was uncertain. In local news media, some were already wondering if they had spent the month in bomb shelters “for nothing.”
The country has lurched from one conflict to another for two and a half years, ever since the Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023, which ignited the war in Gaza. While Mr. Netanyahu and many other Israelis have praised the military’s accomplishments in downgrading their enemies’ capabilities, so far there have been no total victories or lasting diplomatic resolutions.
At the same time, Mr. Netanyahu’s domestic political timetable is pressing, with elections due before the end of October.
“914 days of war, over 2000 killed, tens of thousands wounded, 4 open fronts and — 0 decisive wins!” Avigdor Liberman, the leader of a right-wing Israeli opposition party, sniped on social media, tallying up the account on Israel’s side.
The United States is now shifting its attention from the battlefield to negotiations with Iran. Israeli officials will not be in the room, adding to the sense of unease among the Israeli public. Israel and Pakistan, the mediating country that is hosting the talks, have no formal diplomatic relations.
In the hours after President Trump announced the temporary cease-fire, the Israeli military bombarded Beirut and other areas and said it struck more than 100 Hezbollah targets within 10 minutes. More than 200 people were killed and more than 1,000 others were wounded in the strikes, according to the Lebanese authorities.
The timing may have been intended to demonstrate that Israel did not count Lebanon as part of the cease-fire understanding, or to get in a final salvo while it was still possible.
The announcement that the Israeli government would open talks with Lebanon seemed to be an acknowledgment of the limits of military force on Israel’s part, and reflect a desire among the Israeli public to see some effort to resolve at least one decades-old conflict.
Israel’s offensive against Hezbollah is continuing for now. Mr. Netanyahu has long favored negotiations under fire. But analysts said American support for Israel on that front could soon run out, with Iran warning that Israel’s actions were undermining the cease-fire.
“The cease-fire announcements themselves were very vague and contradictory,” said Yonatan Touval, an Israeli foreign policy analyst at Mitvim, an independent research group based in Tel Aviv. “We are already seeing conflicting interpretations, with the main ones being over Lebanon.”
In the talks this weekend, Vice President JD Vance is expected to lead the U.S. delegation, and experts said that the negotiations would probably focus first on firming up the terms of the cease-fire, rather than more far-reaching, comprehensive agreements.
Critics of Mr. Netanyahu say that the American administration may now be warier of the Israeli prime minister, given the widespread perception that he played a large role in persuading Mr. Trump to go to war. “With respect to Netanyahu’s leverage in the negotiations,” Mr. Touval said, “at this point he has none.”
Israel and the United States, while closely aligned, have different emphases when it comes to their priorities, according to Michael Herzog, who served as Israeli ambassador to Washington from 2021 to early 2025 and is now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Israel is primarily concerned about the fate of Iran’s stockpile of some 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium, which was buried beneath a nuclear facility near the city of Isfahan during strikes last June. The United States is more concerned about ensuring freedom of passage through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has effectively blockaded for several weeks, causing a global energy crisis.
“There has been a very close dialogue between Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump leading up to and during the war, so Netanyahu could try to influence the U.S. position, and I assume he will try to do that,” Mr. Herzog said.
Then there’s the question of the overthrow of the government in Iran. Experts say there is no way of predicting if, or when, the power structure of the Islamic Republic may fall. But while Israel has put more emphasis on that objective, Mr. Herzog said, Mr. Trump may now be more focused on “behavior change than regime change.”
“Assuming there is no regime change in Iran in the foreseeable future,” Mr. Herzog added, “we have to assume Iran will try to rebuild its capabilities, meaning that we will have to go back to war there in a few years’ time.”
For now, Mr. Trump appears to have Mr. Netanyahu in a bear hug: Their relationship plays well with Mr. Netanyahu’s electorate in Israel, but Mr. Trump is notoriously unpredictable.
If the United States eventually reaches a deal with Iran that Israel considers a bad one, it would be hard to imagine Mr. Netanyahu’s openly coming out against it, as he publicly denounced the nuclear deal during President Barack Obama’s term in 2015.
One measure of the relationship between Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Trump may come around the time that the two-week truce is set to expire, when Israel celebrates its Independence Day on April 22. Traditionally, the country presents its most prestigious award, the Israel Prize, to laureates at a ceremony that day in Jerusalem.
Mr. Trump has been awarded one of the Israel Prizes this year for his “unique contribution to the Jewish people.” It remains to be seen if he will show up in person to receive the honor.
Isabel Kershner, a senior correspondent for The Times in Jerusalem, has been reporting on Israeli and Palestinian affairs since 1990.
Read the full story at nyt News.
Automatic U.S. military draft registration planned by December, filing shows
Source: CNBC • Published: 4/9/2026, 9:55:38 PM
The Selective Service System plans to automatically register eligible American men between ages 18 and 26 for a U.S. military draft by December, almost a half-century after compulsory registration for the draft by that group became law, a government filing shows.
The SSS's proposal would implement a requirement passed by Congress in December in the National Defense Authorization Act to include automatic registration for "every male citizen of the United States" between those ages.
There has not been a military draft since 1973, when U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam was winding down.
But in 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed a law requiring men between the ages of 18 to 25 to register for military conscription. Since then, the federal government has relied on voluntary compliance with that law, not automatic enrollment. Men who are 26 are allowed to enroll late to comply with the law.
The SSS has said that in 2024, 81% of all eligible men registered, a three-percentage point drop from the previous year.
The proposal by the SSS to automatically enroll men in the draft was submitted to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs on March 30.
The proposal was made about a month after the U.S. and Israel began a war against Iran. A two-week ceasefire in that conflict took effect on Tuesday evening.
There are currently no plans to reinstate a draft.
But on March 8, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said President Donald Trump "keeps his options on the table" when Fox News Sunday host Maria Bartiromo asked her about the possibility of the draft returning.
Failure to comply with SSS registration is considered a felony punishable with a fine of up to $250,000 or up to 5 years in prison.
Registration for the Selective Service is required for employment and student financial aid in some states.
SSS registration previously was a requirement for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, but was removed as part of the 2020 FAFSA Simplification Act.
For complete details, visit the original sources linked above.
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