Most Americans don't have a problem with key narratives.
According to a new poll conducted by the Barna Group, a substantial majority of Americans believes in the literal truth of six key Bible stories. For those of us worried about how to communicate biblical truth in our increasingly postmodern and pluralistic culture, the findings indicate that many folks continue to accept the Word of God at face value.
Here are the overall results among adults to the question of whether they thought a specific story in the Bible was "literally true, meaning it happened exactly as described in the Bible":
Christ's crucifixion, burial, and resurrection (75%);
Daniel in the Lion's Den (65%);
Moses parting the Red Sea (64%);
David and Goliath (63%);
Peter walking on water (60%);
God creating the universe in six days (60%).
When you break down the numbers, it gets even more interesting. Several factors are correlated with less belief in a literal resurrection: high education, mainline vs. non-mainline Protestantism, Catholicism vs. Protestantism, and white vs. black. So, statistically speaking, a highly educated white Catholic or mainline professor from the Northeast would likely be more skeptical than a blue-collar African-American Protestant from the Midwest or South.
Further, the more skeptical you are about the Bible, the more likely it is that you are a political liberal. On the flip side, the more you take these narratives literally, the more likely you are to be a conservative:
There were very consistent patterns related to people's political inclinations. Of the six stories examined, just one story (the resurrection of Christ) was considered to be literally true by at least half of all liberals. In contrast, among conservatives, only one of those stories was taken literally by less than 80% (the 76% who embraced the six day creation as absolute truth.) Similarly, the data showed that Republicans were more likely than either Democrats or Independents to accept each of the stories as literally accurate. For all six narratives, Independents were the voting group least likely to hold a literal interpretation, an average of twenty percentage points lower than the norm among Republicans.
This hints, to me at least, that the national Democrats, despite their recent rediscovery of people of faith, have an uphill climb ahead in winning their trust - and their votes. Certainly they have done so with African Americans. It remains to be seen if they will be able to get the much larger numbers of white Protestants to also believe in them.
share thisPosted by Stan Guthrie on October 24, 2007 9:40AM
Comments
"God creating the universe in six days (60%)."
Their is 0 (Zero) evidence this is true.
Posted by: Jim Robinson at October 24, 2007
My understanding is that there are Seven Days in Genesis because Israel's neighbors believed that there were seven planetary gods. Genesis undercuts that completely and frees one from having to appease a different god every day.
There are no capricious gods to appease, but there is the one God who cannot be merely appeased. God appears to have an antipathy towards animal sacrifices...rejecting Cain's and finally putting strict limits on what the ancients felt compelled to do...even monotheists like Noah. God seems to prefer kindness to others over expensive scorched dead animals offerings.
The opening of Genesis isn't just a creation story, then, it's also a story of the destruction of pagan gods. These are simply dismissed; merely numbered and not even named. Naming them would give them a sort of legitimacy, after all.
The days of the week, many now Nordicized in English, are still named after planetary gods. Today is Woden's Day.
It's silly, isn't it, to think that God has some superstitious attachment to the number 7, or that an all powerful God would need six days and a rest in the celestial recliner to recuperate. I'm the one who needs the comfy recliner at the end of the day, not God, right?
Genesis is many things, and one is about learning of what is and isn't idolatry in God's way...and worshiping the number 7 as holy is a kind of idolatry, I think. It's a reduction of Scripture to mere numerology, instead of learning of the development of God's way. Literalism obfuscates the hard enough lessons of Genesis.
Besides, if you can believe in increasingly dubious literalist creationist speculations, you can probably also still believe that black people are under the curse of Ham to serve white people, who are alleged descendants of the blessed son...a too common belief by American Evangelicals in the recent past. The joy of living today is the flood of vetted information from reliable sources..keeping in mind that they are flawed human, as am I.
Who would care today about who was cursed or blessed? The story is about respecting as best one can, the dignity of one's parent. Do that, and you won't have to worry about being cursed by old Dad.
When does literalism become excessive? Was there really a universal flood in the Iron age, as the verse mentioning Tubal Cane suggests? Or should we think of the earliest days of the armaments race, sharp iron tipped spears and swords, and what all that human cleverness has become? God didn't destroy human inventiveness in the story of Noah...as long as there is one human alive, there is inventiveness. How do we live our lives now, when we still hear, from Genesis, the clanging of Tubal Cain's weapon's mongering?
Posted by: Greg at October 24, 2007
The problem with adhering to a rigidly literalist interpretation of the creation story, rather than one that is more congruent with what we know from science, is that it puts one on the slippery-slope to disregarding science and expertise in general. It is no surprise that six-day creation literalists tend to be politically conservative, as the corporate-conservative establishment has been banking for years on their apathy toward pollution, destruction of wetlands, extinction of species, global warming and tobacco dangers. It is not too surprising, but alarming nevertheless, that 60 percent of Americans believe in a literal six-day creation. Contrast that with how many Republican presidential candidates "don't believe in evolution": only three out of nine, and none of them were frontrunners.
It sounds like Mr. Guthrie is saying that Democrats may need to pander to rigid Biblical literalists in order to win elections. I have a better idea. Since Stan has pointed out that there is an inverse correlation between higher educational levels and propensity to take the Bible stories absolutely literally, the best thing Democrats could do is encourage more people to go to college. Hopefully many of them will go to Christian colleges that teach thoughtful approaches to the creation story by the likes of Francis Collins and Howard Van Til.
Posted by: Patrick at October 25, 2007
Fascinating, of course without a pristine creation followed by a real, historical space-time Fall, there is no Gospel at all, as Dr. Francis Schaeffer pointed out. We'd have no answers, and no Christianity.
As to education, I more than 4 years of graduate work. Biblical Christianity -is- reasonable and logical, even if it doesn't go along with the spirit of the age.
As an aside, if you don't believe in the inerrancy and authority of Scripture, you are not an evangelical, by defnition.
Posted by: labrialumn at October 29, 2007
I find it fascinating that, in an article discussing whether and what kind of people take the Bible literally, people immediately proceed to not take Genesis 1 and 2 literally.
Posted by: pinoncoffee at October 30, 2007
"God creating the universe in six days (60%)."
Their is 0 (Zero) evidence this is true.
Posted by: Jim Robinson at October 24, 2007
"There"
Posted by: Pubert Magoo at December 11, 2007
The important thing to know is that the word translated as "day" is more accurately translated as "period of time". So it just means that creation was broken down into 6 distinct periods.
Posted by: luke at March 26, 2008
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