What Evangelicals Don’t Know: The Bible & Salvation

The PEW Forum released a study last week looking at what Americans know about religion, their own and others. Aside from the prominently-circulated headline that apparently atheists and agnostics know more about religion than those who call themselves religious, there are some revealing stats from deeper in the report.

The Bible

For example, only 43% of mainline Protestants and 71% of Evangelicals can name the four Gospels.

Salvation

Only 28% of Evangelicals know that Protestant Christians believe in salvation by faith alone. Half of that number, 14%, of Mainline Christians know that. More than 80% of both groups know instead that Mother Theresa was Catholic. Historically, Evangelicals have been defined by a high view of Scripture and the centrality of the Gospel, Jesus’ death on a cross for our sins and resurrection to conquer satan, sin, and death. Yet, this study shows that large portions of Evangelicals can’t even tell someone what the four Gospels are (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) or that we are saved by faith alone in Christ alone. The truth is, many Evangelicals and most mainline Christians need the Gospel just as bad as non-believers. It simply cannot be assumed that just because someone is in your church or calls themselves a Christian that they are. Here are two practical ways we try to do communications in a way that points to Jesus - and thereby point to the authority of the Bible and God’s gift of salvation - here at Mars Hill Church.

  1. Make the distinction between a testimony and a biography. Whether you’re doing one in church, on a blog, or on video, having someone tell their story will either reveal the hero to be God or someone else. A testimony is a teaching piece, a mini sermon - an opportunity to explain what the Gospel looks like in someone’s life. God is the hero, not them.
  2. View all of your communication operations as supporting the pulpit, not isolated ministries. If your pastor is preaching through books of the Bible and all of the content you produce supports that, you’re communication will not only be unified, it will point to Jesus as the hero of the Bible (and of them).

Evidence of a Weightless God

[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.

… Where Christian faith is offered as a means of finding personal wholeness rather than holiness, the church has become worldly.

There are many other forms of worldliness that are comfortably at home in the evangelical church today. Where it substitutes intuition and feelings for biblical truth, it is being worldly. Where its appetite for the Word has been lost in favor of light discourses and entertainment, it is being worldly. Where it has restructured what it is and what it offers around the rhythms of consumption, it is being worldly, for customers are actually sinners whose place in the church is not to be explained by a quest for self-satisfaction but by a need for repentance. Where it cares more about success than about faithfulness, more about size than spiritual health, it is being worldly. Where the centrality of God to worship is lost amidst the need to be distracted and to have fun, the church is being worldly because it is simply accommodating itself to the preeminent entertainment culture in the world. Is it not odd that in so many church services each Sunday, services that are ostensibly about worshiping God, those in attendance may not be obliged to think even once about his greatness, grace, and commands? Worship in such contexts often has little or nothing to do with God.
David F. Wells, “Introduction: The Word in the World,” in The Compromised Church: The Present Evangelical Crisis, ed. John H. Armstrong (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1998), 31.

Really proud of the team I work with at Mars Hill Church. Check out the newest video we did for Darrin Patrick’s new book.

What is the Bible Basically About?

I never thought I’d see Tim Keller and Tristeza in the same piece of media. Nice.

(via The Gospel Coalition)