- Responses on a nationally representative survey exploring more private aspects of faith counter popular perceptions of cratering modern faith in America.
- For instance, 73% of Americans have felt God speaking to them at some point in their lives, including 47% in the past week.
- And 71% of Americans say “being a child of God” is important to them on some level.
- Also, surprisingly, three-quarters of people who identify with no faith are open to “the possibility that something lies beyond this life.”
A nationally representative survey released last week found that 71% of Americans say “being a child of God” is moderately, very or extremely important to them.
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The idea that 5 out of 7 Americans share a belief in their intimate connection to divinity — and hold it to be important — departs from the more common portrayal of an American population obsessed with which political tribe any one of us belongs to. Only 55% of the same Americans surveyed said that political party or ideology — e.g., being a Republican or Democrat — is important.
This was a standout finding from “Survey of Lived Religion,” conducted by BYU’s Wheatley Institute and authored by law professor Shima Baughman, data analyst Stephen Cranney and Paul Lambert, director of the institute’s Religion & Human Flourishing Initiative. The survey carefully represented the religious diversity of the nation — Protestants; Catholics; a range of religious minorities, including Latter-day Saints, Jews and Muslims; and the religiously unaffiliated.
“Isn’t it remarkable that actually the large majority of Americans you interact with every day prioritize the same identities?” Lambert told the Deseret News.
“We’re so focused on polarization and hyper-politicization that we don’t think about what we all have in common,” Baughman added.
The identity of being personally connected to God is universal among religions, Baughman said. “That was the most surprising but also heartwarming part of the study for me, is just seeing how we see ourselves as divine.”
“When I was at a public university, I wouldn’t feel comfortable talking about myself as a divine creation,” Baughman added. “But maybe we can be more comfortable talking about these religious convictions, because we share a lot more of them than we might think.”
This is the first of four reports coming in the months ahead that examine faith’s relationship to personal well-being and civil society and its transmission to the next generation. Below are five other takeaways, drawing together details from the full report and interviews with the authors.
Measuring the faith you usually can’t see
“Ask most Americans whether they are religious and you’ll get a one-word answer,” the report begins. “Ask what they believe, how often they sense God in their daily lives, what they hope happens when they die, or why they show up to the congregation they do, and you’ll get something far richer and more surprising.”
At the foundation of this survey is a critique of how scholars have long reduced the measure of religiosity to “a handful of blunt measures: Do you attend services? How religious do you consider yourself?”
“Affiliation, identification — there are a thousand surveys that measure that,” Cranney said. “But that only gets at a certain aspect of it, so we wanted to kind of dive a little deeper on that.”
So these scholars created questions to explore how Americans’ daily lives outside of religious services include spirituality — for both religious people and religious ‘nones.’
“An individual’s relationship with the divine is not defined by which attendance box they check,” they emphasize in the report. “It runs through their thoughts, their feelings, their habits, and their sense of meaning — the silent prayer of gratitude, the unexpected sense of being spoken to, the symbols displayed in the home, the hope about what comes after death.”
5 other ‘lived religion’ survey takeaways
1. Even most ‘nones’ believe in some sacred realities
The story of continuous religious decline is missing something, according to this report. “Faith and the impact of God in people’s lives is still very much alive for the large majority of Americans,” Lambert said.
For instance:
- Ninety percent of Americans believe in God or a higher power.
- Eighty percent say there is “something spiritual beyond the natural world,” even if they cannot see it.
- Seventy-five percent of Americans place at least some importance on religion.
But there are even surprising reasons for hope among those who don’t identify with any faith.
“Do religious ‘nones’ really believe nothing?” Baughman asked. “Do they believe that after we die, we just end in some kind of dark black hole?”
It turns out that surprising numbers of nones (about half) believe in a variety of supernatural possibilities after death. “They’re not universally aligned on the idea that there’s no God for sure,” she said. “Even those who aren’t showing up to church, necessarily, have deep spiritual beliefs and practices.”
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According to the report, 46% of “nones” also “believe that objects, people or places can hold spiritual energy or power,” while 4 in 10 believe that the universe guides them “toward certain people or events.”
“Definitely the sort of atheist, complete nonbeliever is still quite rare,” Cranney added. “They’re not vanishingly rare, but they’re still very much in the minority.”
“There’s still definitely a spiritual hunger that’s out there.”
2. The importance of personal worship for many
Outside of affiliation and identity, this BYU survey captured some interesting findings on how Americans relate to the divine within the walls of their own home:
- Seventy-three percent have felt at some point that God was speaking to them, including 47% who felt so in the past week.
- Seventy-seven percent of respondents thank God at least once a month, with 43% thanking God multiple times a day — higher “than those who regularly express gratitude to another person.” The report notes, “For many Americans, it would not be an exaggeration to posit that God is their primary outlet for gratitude.”
- Four out of 10 Americans also read their Bible in the past week — with another 38% reading it at some point in recent memory.
Baughman said this last finding was both surprising and hopeful. “We’re still looking to the word of God among all the many influences and pressures and devices that we have in front of our faces.”
3. Missing the living God
The authors note how often community is referenced by secular observers to explain why so many continue to value religion today. But while community connections are important, Lambert emphasizes that “there’s been a major component missing” in that story — namely, the way religion can reinforce a “connection between me and my God — the personal adoration, the personal worship and the personal communion.”
“That has tremendous impact — so much more impact even than just the community,” Lambert underscored. “People aren’t going to church because it’s fun. They’re not going to church only because it’s a good social thing or because it gives you something to do on Sundays.”
They’re going to church because they believe God is a reality, he said — and that they are personally connected to that divinity in a way that gives their family and lives something more than mere existence.
4. Institutional commitments vary
The survey found that about about half of Christians did not attend church on Easter last year — traditionally one of the most important days in the Christian calendar.
Yet a vast majority of Christians had been baptized, a symbolic death and rebirth that signals their new life as a disciple of Christ. A share of these self-identified Christians remained unbaptized, ranging from 10-12% of Protestants, 13% of Catholics and 20% of those who identify as “other Christian.”
“The findings about baptism and Easter attendance among Christians was what caught me off guard the most,” Lambert said, underscoring how different various faith communities are.
The authors also note that “spiritual beliefs do not always translate into action.” Only one-third of religious Americans and 1 in 10 religiously unaffiliated Americans reported changing a decision in the past month based on “prayer, meditation or a spiritual impression.”
5. Anticipating death draws out the sacred
Only about one-quarter of religious “nones” say death is simply the end, the report notes. While this small subset are committed to non-belief in any future life, a broader group — a surprising 3 out of 4 people who identify with no faith — are open to “the possibility that something lies beyond this life, whether heaven, reunion with the divine, reincarnation, another form of existence or simply an unknown reality they cannot yet describe.”
Very few positively affirm that “nothing” exists after death. Cranney pointed out that the 77% who said they’d prefer a religious official at their funeral is much higher than the number of people who attended church for Easter — hinting again at the way faith takes on new importance in the vulnerable moments of life.
One-third of religiously unaffiliated Americans say that religious elements at their funeral are important. The authors note, “Even Americans who have stepped away from organized religion often turn back to it when considering life’s final passage.”
Baughman added that even if someone is not religious, people involved in hospice or end-of-life decisions might still ask whether they want somebody of faith to officiate at their funeral.
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“And a lot of the times it’s yes,” she said.