Belief in God is falling even though prices are increasing. The good news is that 81% of Americans still believe in God, and a lot of them think that God hears prayers and can intervene to answer them.
The good news is detailed in an article from Gallup. Clicking below will take you to the complete document, including methodology and the questions asked, as well as the rest of the site.
Since 1945, this is the trend. It is noted by Gallup.
Gallup first asked this question in 1944, repeating it again in 1947 and twice each in the 1950s and 1960s. In those latter four surveys, a consistent 98% said they believed in God. When Gallup asked the question nearly five decades later, in 2011, 92% of Americans said they believed in God.
A subsequent survey in 2013 found belief in God dipping below 90% to 87%, roughly where it stood in three subsequent updates between 2014 and 2017 before this year’s drop to 81%.
Since there is no data between the late 1960s and the present, the decrease in the line is just an extrapolation. There is no doubt that the long-term drop is a real drop and that Americans are losing their religion. We might be as religious as northern Europe someday.
Conservatives and liberals give very different data on whether God hears or answers prayers. The idea that God hears prayers and intervenes is problematic. 42% of Americans could be asked a lot of questions. If you think of God as a Man in the Sky with a plan, you might think that a special request from someone for God to attend to their personal desires is trivial. So it's going.
The answers were broken down by political party identification, ideological identification, Frequency of Going to Church, and Age. Click to enlarge.
The majority of people who go to church weekly say that God hears prayers and intervenes, with Republicans more religious than Democrats. Republicans have the lowest percentage of overall Atheism at 7%, followed by Democrats at 26% and Independents at 18%. If you divide people by conservative, moderate, or liberal instead of political party, the percentage of unbelievers will go up. Some of these people are religious, but not all of them. Those people are not believers.
Younger people tend to believe in God more than older people. You can see that there has been a change in the data since the beginning of the year.
Gallup concluded.
Fewer Americans today than five years ago believe in God, and the percentage is down even more from the 1950s and 1960s when almost all Americans did. Still, the vast majority of Americans believe in God, whether that means they believe a higher power hears prayers and can intervene or not. And while belief in God has declined in recent years, Gallup has documented steeper drops in church attendance, church membership and confidence in organized religion, suggesting that the practice of religious faith may be changing more than basic faith in God.
It's true that America is becoming more secular, and that can only be a positive thing.
Barry.
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