Nick Bogardus

[I originally wrote this for another blog in February 2010]

Last week the PEW Forum released a study on religion among the Millenials (those aged 18-29). Here are some of the findings.

• 52% of Evangelicals ages 18-29 believe there is more than one way to heaven.
• 79% of Mainline Protestants ages 18-29 believe there is more than one way to heaven.
• 43% of Evangelicals ages 18-29 believe Christianity is the only way to heaven.
• 18% of Mainline Protestants ages 18-29 Christianity is the only way to heaven.
• 86% of Evangelicals ages 18-29 are absolutely certain in their belief in God.
• 70% of Mainline Protestants ages 18-29 are absolutely certain in their belief in God.
• 85% of Evangelicals ages 18-29 believe in hell, while 89% believe in heaven.
• 70% of Mainline Protestants ages 18-29 believe in hell, while 85% believe in heaven.

While 86% of of young evangelicals are certain in their belief in God, more than half believe that people can go to heaven without Jesus.

The results also show that Millenials are more apt to believe in heaven than hell.

The Root

A couple things that we can say about these findings are that we see a continued decline in orthodox Christian belief that is more than likely the effect of our culture’s pluralism and moralistic therapeutic deism (as diagnosed by Christian Smith from Notre Dame). Here are the traits he associates with that worldview.

• A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.
• God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and most world religions.
• The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about one-self.
• God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when he is needed to resolve a problem.
• Good people go to heaven when they die.

Less Compelling Than Flattery

“It is one of the defining marks of Our Time that God is now weightless. I do not mean by this that he is ethereal but rather that he has become unimportant. He rests upon the world so inconsequentially as not to be noticeable. He has lost his saliency for human life. Those who assure the pollsters of their belief in God’s existence may nonetheless consider him less interesting than television, his commands less authoritative than their appetites for affluence and influence, his judgment no more awe-inspiring than the evening news, and his truth less compelling than the advertisers’ sweet fog of flattery and lies. That is weightlessness.”

–David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 88.

Not only are those who don’t know Jesus lost, it’s clear that a growing number within the church are lost as well.