Tuesday, April 26, 2005

The State of the Church

The Barna Group released their 2005 report on the state of the Church on April 11.

The data for 2005 were generated from a study in January based on a nationwide survey of a random sample of 1003 adults. That survey asked the same questions about religious practices and perspectives that Barna has been tracking in national surveys each January for the last fifteen years. Here are some of their more interesting results:

More than nine out of ten American adults engage in some type of faith-related practice during a typical week.

The survey found a small but noteworthy increase in Bible reading. Currently, 45% of adults read the Bible during a typical week, not including when they are at church. That figure represents a minimal increase over the past few years, but a significant rise from the 31% measured in 1995, the lowest level of Bible reading recorded by Barna in the past 15 years. The current statistic is still below the levels achieved in 1980s and early 1990s, but the report shows that the trend is upward.

Despite the media frenzy surrounding the influence of evangelical Christians during the 2004 presidential election, the new study indicates that evangelicals remain just 7% of the adult population. That number has not changed since the Barna Group began measuring the size of the evangelical public in 1994.

Barna surveys do not ask people to define themselves as "evangelical" but instead categorize people as such based on their beliefs. In this approach, evangelicals are a subset of "born-again" Christians. In addition to meeting the born-again criteria evangelicals also meet seven other conditions. Those include saying their faith is very important in their life today; contending that they have a personal responsibility to share their religious beliefs about Christ with non-Christians; stating that Satan exists; maintaining that eternal salvation is possible only through grace, not by being good or doing good deeds; asserting that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on earth; saying that the Bible is totally accurate in all it teaches; and describing God as the all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect deity who created the universe and still rules it today. In this framework, being classified as "evangelical" is not dependent upon any kind of church or denominational affiliation or involvement.

When all of the atheists, agnostics and adults associated with non-Christian faith groups are combined, they are only half as numerous as the born-again segment (21% compared to 40% respectively). The remaining body of people, 39% of the nation's adult population, is what Barna categorizes as "notional Christians" - people who consider themselves to be Christian but not born-again. For more than a decade, the sizes of the born-again and notional segments have been roughly equivalent.

Given the criteria for being "evangelical" it's something of a surprise that evangelicals are only about 28% of all "born-again" Christians. It's also a bit surprising, to me anyway, that 40% of adults are in this latter group. That seems rather a large number given the dominant secularism of the culture. Perhaps there are many people who claim to be born-again whose lives, paradoxically, are relatively unaffected by their alleged rebirth.