Beliefs among Evangelicals

For my apologetics class that I teach on Wednesdays, I am preparing to teach the chapter titled, "Who Was Jesus?" from the book, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision by William Lane Craig. I came across a survey that was most recently administered this year regarding religious beliefs. The survey is called The State of Theology. The results of the survey can be found at Data Explorer - The State of Theology.

The survey allows you to see the beliefs of the American population, but more interestingly to me was the ability to sort the results based on the following criteria:

In the Affiliation category, Evangelicals is one of the categories, and interestingly, for the category of beliefs, the choices were: all, evangelical, and not evangelical. So, evidently, there are people who affiliate with an evangelical church but in terms of their beliefs, they are not evangelical.

I was particularly interested in examining the beliefs of all evangelicals who have evangelical beliefs, and evangelicals with evangelical beliefs in different age groups.

By the way, this site lets you create your own survey (Create Group Survey - The State of Theology) that you can send out to family and friends by sharing a link, and you can also take the survey yourself.

The Statements and Responses

There were 35 statements and respondents were asked to respond to each statement as either a False or a True statement with one of these choices:

Here are the statements. The bold-faced statements are the ones that particularly interested me that had surprising results.

  1. God is a perfect being and cannot make a mistake.
  2. There is one true God in three persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
  3. God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
  4. God is unchanging.
  5. Biblical accounts of the physical (bodily) resurrection of Jesus are completely accurate. This event actually occurred.
  6. God loves all people the same way.
  7. Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.
  8. God created marriage to be between one man and one woman.
  9. The Holy Spirit is a force but is not a personal being.
  10. The Holy Spirit gives a spiritual new birth or new life before a person has faith in Jesus Christ.
  11. The Holy Spirit can tell me to do something which is forbidden in the Bible.
  12. Everyone sins a little, but most people are good by nature.
  13. Even the smallest sin deserves eternal damnation.
  14. God counts a person as righteous not because of one’s works but only because of one’s faith in Jesus Christ.
  15. Everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God.
  16. The Bible, like all sacred writings, contains helpful accounts of ancient myths but is not literally true.
  17. The Bible is 100% accurate in all that it teaches.
  18. Modern science disproves the Bible.
  19. God chose the people he would save before he created the world.
  20. Hell is a real place where certain people will be punished forever.
  21. There will be a time when Jesus Christ returns to judge all the people who have lived.
  22. Worshiping alone or with one’s family is a valid replacement for regularly attending church.
  23. Christians should not allow their religious beliefs to influence their political decisions.
  24. Every Christian has an obligation to join a local church.
  25. Sex outside of traditional marriage is a sin.
  26. Abortion is a sin.
  27. People should be able to choose their gender regardless of their biological sex.
  28. The Bible’s condemnation of homosexual behavior doesn’t apply today.
  29. God is unconcerned with my day-to-day decisions.
  30. The Bible has the authority to tell us what we must do.
  31. Religious belief is not about objective truth.
  32. The Bible is the highest authority for what I believe.
  33. It is very important for me personally to encourage non-Christians to trust Jesus Christ as their Savior.
  34. Jesus Christ’s death on the cross is the only sacrifice that could remove the penalty of my sin.
  35. Only those who trust in Jesus Christ alone as their Savior receive God’s free gift of eternal salvation.

The Results

Of course, some of the results of the survey are what you would expect, but others were somewhat surprising.

In each of the screenshots that you'll see below, the graph on top shows the results for all U.S. Adults. The bottom graph shows the results for who 1. are affiliated with an evangelical church, 2. are evangelical in their beliefs, and 3. attend church at least once to twice a month.

Then I took screenshots for each age group that met the criteria mentioned in the previous paragraph.

If there is only one graph in a screenshot, it is the results of the evangelicals for either all age groups or a specific age group.

Interpreting the graphs

At the bottom of each graph is a scale that ranges from 100% Disagree on the far left and 100% Agree on the far right.

In the graphs below, the following responses are indicated by the colors indicated below. (At the website, you can click on each of the colors in a graph to see the exact percentage of people who fell into each category. )

Statement 3 - God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

I thought it was interesting that there was a large percentage of evangelicals who felt this was a true statement, particularly among the younger age groups.

Statement 7 - Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.

If demographic data regarding religious beliefs interests you, you go this web page that I created for Week 3 of the apologetics course - Week 3. We looked at the group of individuals called the "religious nones" and sub-group of them called the "nothing in particulars."

Ryan Burge has an interesting Substack called Graphs about Religion. This particular post titled, The Nones Project: SBNRs is particularly interesting.