Growing Share of Americans Don’t Attend Church, Believe God Had No Part in Human Origins: Gallup

A growing share of Americans believe God had no role in the origins of human beings, according to Gallup. A separate poll released this year found weekly church attendance is declining in America. Together, the findings underscore how Americans’ religious beliefs have shifted over the years.

In a report released Monday, pollsters at Gallup found the percentage of Americans who agree with the statement, “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process,” has risen from 9% in 1999 to 24% this year.

Despite this increase, most Americans surveyed still said they believe God either created human beings in their present form or that God guided the evolutionary process.

The rise in support for atheistic evolution in America tracks with decline we have witnessed in church membership and attendance.

A 2013 Gallup Poll found most Americans believe religion is losing influence in America — but a majority of Americans also believe the nation would be better off if Americans were more religious. Another Gallup survey published that year found weekly church attendance in America had decreased to levels roughly on par with where it was in the 1940s.

In 2017, Pew Research Center found a growing share of Americans identify as “spiritual but not religious.”

And earlier this year, Gallup reported that weekly church attendance has declined in America since 2000.

Along the way, pundits and pollsters have also noticed growing interest in the occult — especially among young people.

It’s worth pointing out that a large number of people still attend church, and most Americans still profess to be Christians, but the changes our country is seeing are still significant.

We have written before how — contrary to popular belief — the so-called “culture wars” are not prompting people to stop going to church. Churches have opposed abortion and infanticide for the better part of the past 2,000 years, and Christians have affirmed that marriage ought to be the union of one man to one woman since the first century. Believers have addressed these topics and others publicly for the past two millennia.

Unfortunately, declining church attendance and shifting religious views could be a symptom of people simply seeing church gatherings — and faith in general — as inconvenient, unnecessary, and irrelevant. In fact, many believers think they can follow Christ without the church. But being part of a local group of believers isn’t optional. It’s an important part of discipleship. Christians help each other grow in the faith.

Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.

The Desecration of Easter: Guest Column

On Good Friday, President Biden declared Easter Sunday as “Transgender Day of Visibility.” Though he must have known the outrage that would follow, his defenders were quick to note that March 31 has been recognized in this way for over a decade and just happened this year to coincide with Easter. Thus, they argued, Christians should not take offense that our “devoutly Catholic” president would desecrate this day recognized as sacred by millions for over two thousand years. This, in spite of the fact that two dozen other made-up days (not to mention three different months!) are marked on our calendars in recognition of the growing list of sexual identifications. 

The president’s actions can be best understood by an analysis of the spectacle that occurred in February inside New York City’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. While the salacious details should, in the spirit of Paul’s warning to the Ephesians, be left unspoken, Professor Carl Trueman described in First Things a funeral held for a man who was a militant atheist, who dressed as a woman, was often outlandishly perverted, and engaged in prostitution. Funeral-goers made speeches meant to shock and offend and proclaimed the man a saint. 

Trueman noted how the event marked a shift from what he called “disenchantment” to “desecration”: 

The struggle for the heart of a culture always takes place in two areas: time and space. As the Christian transformation of the Roman Empire was marked by the emergence of the liturgical calendar and the turning of pagan temples into churches, so we can expect the reverse to take place when a culture paganizes. … Our age is not marked so much by disenchantment as by desecration. The culture’s officer class is committed not merely to marginalizing that which previous generations considered sacred. It is committed to its destruction. 

German sociologist Max Weber first used the term “disenchantment” in 1918 to describe the Western world’s shift from the belief in the divine and transcendent to materialistic scientism. In fact, the German word used by Weber translates more closely to “breaking a magic spell.” More recently, Charles Taylor popularized this notion of secularism as “disenchantment” in his magisterial A Secular Age. 

However, as Friedrich Nietzsche predicted in his parable of “The Madman,” a divine and transcendent view of the universe has been harder to abandon than many expected. The French revolutionaries were more than happy to abandon the belief that the king was divinely appointed but still proceeded as if there were moral absolutes, such as libertarian freedom, and other transcendent truths, such as that some have the right to exercise authority over others. Even so, Nietzsche’s “madman” predicted that, eventually, the “death of God” would leave many taken-for-granted beliefs about dignity and morality untethered and, therefore, vulnerable. 

He was right. The disenchantment of the West has, in fact, left us gnostic, doubting even the givenness of material reality. Some even appeal to scientific authority to say that our physical bodies are unrelated to sex and gender.  

This is the latest form of the Gnostic heresy that has taken various forms throughout Church history but always prioritizes an inner, “spiritual” knowledge about God and His world over and above anything He revealed about His world. In all its forms, gnosticism absolutizes the mistaken distinction between the “sacred” and the “mundane.” This distinction conflicts with a biblical vision, which teaches that God created all things spiritual and material, including human beings.  

Scripture also proclaims that Jesus was present at Creation and is Lord over heaven and earth—something that will be acknowledged at the end of history when “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow … and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” Here, Paul is not describing a personal, non-material, “inner” experience of Christians saying privately inside their hearts, “I think Jesus is Lord,” or “I’ve made Jesus Lord of my life.” What he’s describing is what Christianity teaches: that Jesus Christ is lord over time, space, and history. 

For example, almost as soon as Christ’s followers had the freedom to do so, they built grand, intricate cathedrals as sacred spaces within time and space as a way to proclaim His authority over time and space. These spaces were, in a sense, physical representations of the incarnation, the divine inhabiting the mundane. Not only are places like St. Patrick’s in New York City beautiful, but they were meant to say something about the kind of world in which we live, and the kind of authority God holds over all of it. Easter is not just a day off for fun and family, it is a remembrance of the obedience and victory that Christ had within time and space as the defining moment of human history. 

It only makes sense then, that those who wish to challenge God’s authority would attempt to reclaim these spaces for themselves. This is what Professor Trueman meant by this shift from “disenchantment” to “desecration”—a shift we’re in right now. “Disenchantment” describes the cultural detachment from transcendent reality. “Desecration” describes what inevitably follows, the attempt to usurp God’s claim to authority and instead claim times and spaces for another authority. Or, as Louise Perry tweeted in reaction to President Biden’s attempt to claim Easter Sunday for a different religion, “We are repaganizing.”  

The ideas of the sexual revolution, including the normalization of homosexuality and the denial of biological sex, begin by denying God’s role in creation and end by rejecting His authority over all of life. For revolutionaries, it’s not enough for others to merely “tolerate” their revolution. All must “affirm” it. 

Almost certainly, the kind of “desecration” we saw on Sunday will continue and even become more shocking. But, the truth remains: Christ is Creator and Lord. The truth is that every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess that “all authority in heaven and on earth” belongs to Jesus. 

Copyright 2024 by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Reprinted from BreakPoint.org with permission.