Daily Verse | Psalm 62:11-12
One thing God has spoken,
two things I have heard:
that you, O God, are strong,
and that you, O Lord, are loving.
Wednesday’s Reading: Psalms 67-72
It’s Wednesday and our carjackers are picking up speed and starting to shimmy in the turns with us in the back seat as we careen down the Avenue of the Americas with a full tank of gas and a wallet emptied by their cruelty and indifference, knowing that they’ll either go out in a blaze of glory or screech to a stop in Davos where they’ll hand us off for compliance training without our freedom, possessions, or sanity.
No time is a good time to reject belief in God, but this would be a particularly unwise time to do so. Still, this is the United States of America, where wisdom is lacking and where the idea of God just got a little less support.
The percentage of Americans who say they believe in God has dipped to the lowest number in the past nearly 80 years, according to a new Gallup poll published Friday.
The Values and Belief poll, conducted from May 2 to 22, showed 81% of people answered that they believe in God. That is down six percentage points from the 87% of respondents who said they believed in God in the 2017 poll. This year is the lowest percentage in Gallup’s trend since the public opinion polling company first asked the question in 1944.
This year’s poll found 17% of Americans said they do not believe in God.
Joe Biden’s America, people. Where even our spiritual condition is the worst in decades. Seriously, more than 90 percent of people believed in God from 1944 to 2011, with the number stabilizing at a high of 98 percent from 1944 through the 1960s.
Whether you believe in God or not seems to correspond with your political affiliation.
The Gallup Values and Beliefs poll found that the decrease in theism has been driven by young adults and those on the political left. Both groups’ belief in God has dropped by 10 percent or more compared to the 2013-2017 average for their demographics.
These groups are also those least likely to say they believe in God in comparison to other demographics.
Liberals (62 percent), young adults (68 percent) and Democrats (72 percent) gave significantly lower rates of belief in God, while conservatives (94 percent) and Republicans (92 percent) gave the highest.
The least change in belief has occurred among conservatives and married adults.
What that seems to be telling us is that religious belief — or at least belief in God — plays a big role in the political divisions we have in this country.
Younger Americans are also less likely to believe in God than their parents and grandparents. 68 percent of 18-29 years say they don’t believe in God, compared to 81 percent of 30-49 year olds and 88 percent of 50-64 year olds.
18-29 year olds includes those who went to college, where we all know that students are indoctrinated into hating America and anything American, including our historical norms when it came to Christian faith.
Our faith hasn’t been passed along to the next generation, it seems. Yet, we need men and women of faith who take their beliefs seriously and let it affect how they vote. Paul was quite clear with his young protégé, Timothy, that “the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others” (2 Tim. 2:2).
However, we’re not even doing the basics.
Interestingly, while belief in God is on the decline, Gallup clocked an even steeper decline in church attendance, church membership and trust in religious institutions as a whole. In other words, it may not be just that belief in God is dropping, but that it’s evolving into something less beholden to traditional ideas of what it even means to believe in God.