Dr. Claude Mariottini has a very good post analyzing the recent Pew survey on religion in the US with respect to Evangelicals. You can read it all here.There are some very interesting results and as Claude points out, they make one wonder about how the questions were phrased. Still, they are not too surprising to me. From Dr. Marionttini’s blog:
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has published a major survey on religious life in America. The survey, U. S. Religious Landscape Survey, was an attempt at understanding the beliefs and practices of religious and non-religious people in the USA. The Pew Forum surveyed 35,000 Americans and compiled the results. A Summary of Key Findings is available free online in PDF format.
In a previous post I looked at a section of the survey and commented on how atheists, agnostics, and secular people responded to the questions about God. In the present post I will discuss evangelicals and their views about God. The survey also deals with the beliefs of mainline churches, black churches, Catholics, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Orthodox churches. In this post I will only discuss the evangelical churches because of my interest in the evangelical movement in the USA.
The survey provides the following information about evangelicals:
1. Evangelicals view other religions
57% believe that many religions can lead to eternal life
53% believe that there is more than one true way to interpret the teachings of their religion2. Evangelicals and God
99% believe in God. Of these:
79% believe in a personal God
13% believe in an impersonal God
7% don’t know