Evangelical beliefs on decline, pollster says - Barna Research Group

Christian Century, Dec 14, 1994

The percentage of religiously conservative Christians is declining nationwide, says a pollster whose findings may signal a shrinking of the evangelical base for the Christian Right. Only 7 percent of American adults hold "evangelical" beliefs and commitments, compared to 9 percent last year and 12 percent in 1992, according to a new book by pollster George Barna, president of Barna Research Group, a firm based in Glendale, California.

Barna uses eight standards to classify respondents as evangelical, one of them being belief in an error-free Bible. Although religion of some sort remains "very important" to 62 percent of the U.S. population (up 3 percent from 1991), the proportion who strongly agree that the Bible is totally accurate in its teachings, Barna said, dropped from 47 percent three years ago to 38 percent this year.

"The movement of the data suggests that we may see a continued shrinkage of the ranks of evangelicals in the immediate future, short of a miraculous outpouring of God's Spirit upon the people of our land," Barna predicted in Virtual America (Regal Books). The polister did not speculate on what his findings mean for politically active, religiously motivated groups--such as Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition--that are achieving prominence in the Republican Party and in grass-roots politics. "We haven't done any research on that question," Barna said. Nevertheless, his results seem to suggest that the demographic base for Christian Right organizers is diminishing.

Barna and the better-known George Gallup Jr. are among the busiest pulse-takers of American religion. Religiously active like Gallup, Barna has written 19 books aimed at the evangelical market. Both pollsters use standard public-opinion research procedures, sociologist R. Stephen Warner of the University of Illinois at Chicago noted recently. "One difference between them is that Gallup tends to be optimistic and Barna seems to be pessimistic in interpreting results," Warner said.

Barna points to several indicators of a downswing in affirmation of strongly conservative religious statements on the basis of his telephone surveys of 1,205 adults in 1993 and 1,206 adults in 1994. About 95 percent of Americans continue to say they believe in God or a universal force. But just 67 percent of those polled agreed with a definition of God as "the all-powerful, all-knowing Creator of the universe who rules the world today," whereas 73 percent agreed with that definition in 1992. Likewise, Barna's latest surveys show that 72 percent believe "there is no such thing as absolute truth," compared to 67 percent who agreed with that statement in 1991.

"So many people who might have held orthodox [Christian] views in the past have embraced a much broader set of beliefs," Barna commented. "There is a big trend toward a diverse and inclusive spirituality." Barna divides his respondents by their replies to religious questions into non-Christian (65 percent) and "born-again. Christian" (35 percent), with "evangelicals" being a stringent category (currently 7 percent) within the born-again Christian classification.

The born-again people, in Barna's view, are those who say they have an ongoing, personal commitment to christ that is still important today, and who believe they are going to heaven because they have confessed their sins and accepted Jesus as their savior. (About 40 percent were in this category in 1992, Barna said.) To be classified as evangelical by Barna, respondents must agree with those two statements plus six others: that religion is important in their lives; that God is an all-powerful, all-knowing Creator and ruler of the world; that you cannot get to heaven just by doing good things; that the Bible is accurate in all that it teaches; that Satan is a living force and not symbolic; and that Christians have a personal obligation to tell other people about their religious beliefs.