The biggest thing that surprised me as I dug into this data was that it did not primarily suggest individual people falling away from religious beliefs they had held for many years. Rather, the story of American secularization seems to be a story of younger generations believing less than their parents and grandparents. Some key stats:
For the last 30 years:
- Just under 70% of Americans born in the 1920s and 1930s have said that they “know God exists.”
- For the generations born from the 1940s-70s, the number is slightly lower, but an average of 60% also agree that they know God exists.
- For those born in the 1980s, however, that number drops to 50%.
- And for those born in the 1990s to 40% and falling.
- Only the oldest of those born in the 2000s were old enough to participate in the 2018 GSS survey, but among that group, only 32% said they know God exists.
You can read the whole piece here.
4 comments:
I am probably not representative of the way most people approach survey questions, but I didn’t like how they were worded at all. I consider myself a devout, practicing Catholic, but I don’t think I could confidently say that I know God exists and I have no doubts. I definitely wonder sometimes if I’ve got it all wrong. But I think it’s far more likely that God exists than that He doesn’t, and so I choose to act as though He does.
I don't like the wording either. I'm as firmly convinced as can be that God exists but to say "I know" sounds arrogant, except as the quote from the mouth of Job. But I understand enough that if I were to take this kind of survey I'd check this option...
Aurora and Agnes,
I'd agree that the wording of the question is not great, and I don't know if I would have agreed with the "I know God exists" working myself, since I think doubts are pretty normal. The other two positive belief statement which I included under "some belief in God" are:
“I find myself believing in God some of the time, but not at others” or “While I have doubts, I feel that I do believe in God.”
One of the things that seems odd about all this is that it treats belief in God as a feeling rather than a decision, which I think is wrong.
I went ahead and used the question because it seemed like most of the people taking the survey had responded to it as if the "I know God exists" statement were equivalent to "I believe strongly in God". So I think that the answers do give a sense of how strong belief in God is increasing or decreasing. But it's not how I'd word it if I were doing the survey.
Yes, I agree that people who intend to declare that they firmly believe in God would check the first statement so it mostly works in the way they intended and in the way you use it.
As a mother of adolescent children, I think the results are pretty chilling. I often felt that American Christian believers have a sense of false confidence in Christianity permeating their society - which is supported by your analysis. I thought Middle/Eastern Europeans are more realistic but if these trends are true for us as well we might be falsely optimistic too. (I wonder if the young adults of the latest generation are unwilling to commit themselves to the very strong and categoric statement or are really unsure about their personal religious belief).
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