In 2009 the Barna Group published the results of a survey that astounded me. The survey sought to determine how many people in America have a biblical world view and to discover how America had been trending based on comparisons with 3 other identical surveys taken in 1995, 2000, and 2005. The results were shocking. Only 9% of all American adults have a biblical worldview.
For the purposes of the survey, a “biblical worldview” was defined as believing that absolute moral truth exists; the Bible is totally accurate in all of the principles it teaches; Satan is considered to be a real being or force, not merely symbolic; a person cannot earn their way into Heaven by trying to be good or do good works; Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on earth; and God is the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the world who still rules the universe today. In the research, anyone who held all of those beliefs was said to have a biblical worldview.This list sounds like Christianity 101! Aren't these the basic tenets of the faith? It doesn't even begin to get to the heart of whether one believes what the Bible says in regard to many of the social issues facing the world today. I fear that if they did the numbers would be even lower.
As a North Carolinian, I have just witnessed a major debate regarding how marriage would be defined. Indeed, it is a debate that has refused to go away even though the votes have been cast. The thing that troubled me the most in the weeks leading up to the vote was the number of self described Christians who handled the Word of God as clumsily as the lost. Equally disturbing was the number of people who knew what the Bible said, but chose to set themselves against it.
