A Gallop poll released on December 24th, once again shows the rapid decline of religious importance in America. The questions ranged from church membership to the relevance of religion today.
I was most surprised by the results from this question:
This makes absolutely no sense. The poll concludes that 78% of Americans consider themselves Christian, but 29% believe religion is out of date? And another 15% had no opinion? And only 56% believe religion is important?
WTF? Why do people insist on associating themselves with a religion they view as an out of date relic from a primitive time in human history? If religion is no longer relevant to a person, why continue to call yourself a Christian?
I have personally experienced how difficult it is to discard something you’ve whole-heartedly lived and believed your entire life. But the moment a person decides religion is out of date and irrelevant, they are no longer a religious person. But telling Gallup you’re a Christian that thinks religion is out of date is more than a little nonsensical.
Tags: America, Catholic, Christian, Church, Faith, Gallup, Importance, Irrelevant, Out of date, Protestant, Religion, United States
December 28, 2009 at 1:40 am |
Belief is truly the mask of traditionalism–good revealing stats.
December 28, 2009 at 4:05 am |
I have to agree with Arius about this. I figure a good number of people that call themselves christian do it more out of habit or fear then because they really are one. I saw some of the other questions asked and you see that there are only 61 or 63 % that are members of a church. I see this as telling also.
December 28, 2009 at 5:00 am |
If only the decay could rapidly spread wider… I’m not american, but those law-seeking fundies are scaring. People should really consider about what they really “believe” and have a bit more interest in what’s happening when you let religious bigots rise themselves in the high place of state…
Sad to see that when one religion – christianity – tends to slowly fade in time, another totally primitive looking one – islam – arises instead…
December 28, 2009 at 5:55 pm |
What does “law-seeking” mean?
December 29, 2009 at 10:44 am |
The ones who are attempting to legislate from the Bible.
December 28, 2009 at 8:14 am |
Possibly some of the 29% had some objection to some specific doctrine in a particular religion. I’d be more interested in learning why 15% didn’t answer. I’m guessing that part of that had to do with the grammatical construction of the question.
Here’s another survey:
http://pewresearch.org/databank/dailynumber/?NumberID=386
And what do the Christians believe? This article shocked me.
http://harpers.org/archive/2005/08/0080695
December 28, 2009 at 8:50 am |
I actually did a post on the second article a while back:
Why do so many believe in Jesus? Because they don’t actually know what the Bible says.
December 28, 2009 at 8:26 am |
So what?
Islam is JUST as BAKED as Christianity; just because I can’t call myself a Christian doesn’t mean I’ll be running over to Mohammad and Company.. I can join the Unitairian Universalists, who have a lot of Atheists in their fold, or join… nothing…
December 28, 2009 at 8:44 am |
The reason Islam is growing has more to do with breeding than it does conversion. It doesn’t spread in America, because children aren’t indoctrinated into the religion at birth. People in the Middle East have more children, which equates to a growing religion.
Christian roots are equally as primitive as Islam. Old Testament law is very similar to the primitive Sharia law of Islam. The excessive mistreatment of women and murder in honor of an imaginary god. The main difference is the Judea-Christian religion has evolved and continues to evolve over time.
One day religion will die, and people will find a new reason to justify killing each other.
December 29, 2009 at 11:17 am |
As just a tangential comment. There’s one thing in particular that makes religion an especially dangerous reason for killing other people, as opposed to politics or what have you.
Religion has people believing that any action they do on earth doesn’t necessarily require an earthly reward. At least with politics, you have to deliver your promise at some point. The Soviet Union failed because people had enough and they weren’t buying it anymore. However, if you’re convinced that every hardship you endure on earth for your deity amounts to another mansion in heaven, then there is never any requirement to actually pony up and deliver on your promise.
This is why killing in the name of religion has endured for so long. You never see a particular ideology with the power to whip so many people into a killing frenzy for as long as religion has. Just look at the stretch Christianity had and the streak that Islam has going.
December 28, 2009 at 8:51 am |
If these results puzzle you, I suspect your definition of religion is adopted from conservative Christians or some comparable source. Certainly if religion is about believing traditional propositions based on shoddy evidence or even evidence to the contrary, then you’re absolutely right. But for others of us, religion is indeed a lot like Santa Claus – not affirming his literal existence but making room for ritual and wonder in life in a way that only a literalist could view as somehow competing with science, reason or other ways of approaching life.
December 28, 2009 at 9:11 am |
James–
I don’t misunderstand the definition of religion. Any person can invent a god to worship, just as you have. My point is that 78% of those polled by Gallup claim to be Christian, not simply religious.
The Christian religion certainly is a disorganized amalgam of beliefs, but to call yourself Christian there are a few indisputable requirements. Otherwise you’re practicing “Christianity á la carte.” Follow the parts of the Bible you like and ignore the ugly parts.
Your Santa Claus religion would fall into the same 22% of America that I’m in. You’re a non-Christian.
December 28, 2009 at 11:54 pm |
It is absurd enough when a member of one Christian denomination asserts that other denominations are not Christian. It is downright silly for an Atheist to insist on defining what is Christian.
You are annoyed when some Christian comes here and tells you that you were not a true Christian because if you had been a true one, you would still be one. But you think it proper to tell Mr. McGrath that he described something which is not truly Christian; not truly Christian because it does not subscribe to the rigid literal reading of the scripture that you learned in the Christian phase of your life and that you now reject.
There are over two dozen kinds of Christian in the world but you talk as if the sect that you were once part of are the only true Christians. That’s an amazing amount of loyalty for someone who no longer believes.
December 29, 2009 at 9:20 am |
Touché.
Christianity is a religion based on the texts of the Bible, whether you read them as a literalist or not. Mr. McGrath basically invented a religion. If he gives absolutely no authority to the texts that have sustained Christianity, I’m not sure why he associates his religion with Christianity. That assessment comes from a neutral perspective, not from one who has remnants of loyalty to the Christian sect he once belonged to.
But admittedly, I have no authority to tell him what to call his religion. With the hundreds of variations of Christianity, why not add another version to the list.
December 29, 2009 at 2:06 pm |
One more point:
If he gives absolutely no authority to the texts that have sustained Christianity, I’m not sure why he associates his religion with Christianity.
Authority is not the only way to relate to a set of ideas. Influence is another. We use words like “Jeffersonian”, “Freudian”, “Darwinian”, etc. but the persons referred to by these terms were not authorities in the sense of asserting unbreakable rules. We may regard Dawkins and Hitchens as authorities in the sense that they have studied, thought, written, and spoken extensively about theism and and atheism, but no one imagines that they are authorities in the sense of issuing rules, laws, or dogma.
Thus, just as a biologist might be a Darwinian or a psychiatrist might be a Freudian while recognizing that parts of the early thinking have been shown by later discoveries to be wrong; a religion might be based on the ideas of Jesus, Peter, Paul, and other major thinkers of the early Christian period while taking modern knowledge into consideration and applying the whole thoughtfully rather than by rote to modern circumstances, and such a religion could realistically call itself Christian.
December 29, 2009 at 2:13 pm |
Agreed. That’s the beauty of religion. Rules don’t apply to man-made theology or imaginary deities.
I’m not sure what I was thinking. Trying to apply guidelines to a fictional belief system goes against everything I don’t believe in.
December 28, 2009 at 9:23 am |
Scholars of religion find ‘religion’ very challenging to define in a way that encompasses the wide range of phenomena human beings refer to using that term. My point is not that you ‘misunderstand’ religion but that you seem to have a very clear definition that may do justice to only a narrow subset of “religion.” It may be a very common subset, particularly in the United States, but that doesn’t make it normative. And the statistics you cited suggest that the norm in the US may be changing. THAT more than anything else is my point: conservative religious believers claim they preserve unchanging eternal truths; but that just shows that they deny change is occurring or are unaware of it – not that it isn’t happening.
December 31, 2009 at 1:57 pm |
I say we go with the very first definition of religion that you will find in any dictionary, which requires belief in supernatural being/s or agencies. What the fundies like to do is switch definitions of religion in mid-argument, claiming that anything with a set of practices that is rigidly adhered to, such as scientific investigative protocol, is a religion. They don’t seem to get that science is ready and willing to throw out its most basic assumptions in the face of better evidence, something no theist creed is willing to do.
December 28, 2009 at 9:40 am |
One of the mainstays of Christianity (and most religions I can think of at the moment) is “faith”, belief that doesn’t rest on reason, material evidence or logical proof. Remove logic and reason from your life and it doesn’t seem like that big of a leap to continue to participate (and identify yourself as participating) in a system with which you no longer relate or believe.
December 28, 2009 at 5:54 pm |
Maybe many of that 29% think that there are certain aspects to their religion that are out of date but not that the very concept of religion as a whole is out of date.
December 28, 2009 at 6:00 pm |
besides the question says “largely outdated” not completely outdated.
December 29, 2009 at 11:24 am |
“Christian” is a term many use to describe themselves like they would use “Southern” or “of German ancestry”.
When they take one of these surveys, they look at the list of religions and say, “Well, I’m sure not Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist,… I was born in the west, learned some basic Bible at some point, and I go to church about once a year, plus funerals and weddings. I kinda think there’s a god. So I guess I check the the ‘Christian’ box.”
If such a person met someone like you or me, who actually takes a faith seriously, and we told them they weren’t ‘Christian’, they’d look at us like we were from Mars and say, “Well, what the hell you think I am then. I sure as hell ain’t atheist and I ain’t Jewish or nothin’. Sheesh, yer weird.”
December 29, 2009 at 12:58 pm |
Hey guys, a bit off topic here but has anyone seen this?
December 31, 2009 at 9:00 am |
Bizarre. Maybe they will start leading the Pope to mass in his bullet proof Pope-mobile from now on.
I’m not a fan of human beings that are arrogant enough to believe they are infallible and “God on earth.” But the act of knocking down an 82 year old man is more than a little depraved.
December 29, 2009 at 1:43 pm |
Many people I now consider themselves Christian but aren’t very religious.
December 31, 2009 at 3:59 am |
It’s kinda poignant to see that the religion is out of date these days. Back long before Catholicism spread thanks to the latter Roman Empire (and excluding the fact that Islam always had a hold in the Middle East), God-worship literally spread around the world by assimilating certain customs, some of which are paganistic, from locals as it went around.
One of the obvious signs happens to be that Christmas Day wasn’t even supposed to be December the 25th in the first place, never really involved any sorta snow and ice, nor did it involve Saint Nick.
My guess is that we now have an old fashioned religion, because at some point those “closest to God” realized that the religion’s become too diluted from all the spreading around – and tightened procedures from then on, at the cost of fragmenting the religion and never having it move with the times, ever.
December 31, 2009 at 4:13 am |
I don’t know what it’s like where you live but here in England my experience is that the only connection between Christmas and Christianity is in the name. We put up a Christmas tree and decorations, eat to much, drink to much and have to see relatives we don’t like that much …
December 31, 2009 at 4:23 am |
<__>
December 31, 2009 at 4:25 am
The net has been eatin’ my posts these days.
Once again, round here we do it twice a year. One for Christmas (despite the fact that we ain’t actually Christian), and another which involves a heckload of red. >_>
January 4, 2010 at 3:09 pm |
I guess my wife had a bit too much wine on Thanksgiving because she outed me as an atheist to her parents and grandmother at dinner.
In the ensuing conversation, my mother-in-law admitted to not really believing anything about modern Christian beliefs, but favors the idea of a “personal god”. I told her that she’s a deist, and not a Christian. She couldn’t mentally separate her beliefs from the label of Christianity.
I think there must be many people like this. People in the US are so dismissive of other religious labels, that no matter how much their beliefs may change over the years, they can’t imagine having any other label but Christian.
I think that’s what we’re seeing in these poll numbers.
January 4, 2010 at 4:57 pm |
“This makes absolutely no sense. The poll concludes that 78% of Americans consider themselves Christian, but 29% believe religion is out of date? And another 15% had no opinion? And only 56% believe religion is important?”
Sounds like a poorly designed set of questions.
January 8, 2010 at 5:44 pm |
Or in other words, is Christianity to you (the surveyees) something that is done practically, with heart and soul, a real, vital part of your life … or is it not?
January 8, 2010 at 11:43 pm |
Christianity a vital part of a Christian’s life. Just as Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. is a vital part of the lives of those who practice these various religions. Just because Santa is vital to a child’s life at Christmas time, doesn’t mean it isn’t an man-made superstition.