Dear Survey Monkeys,

Just last week the Gallup organization released a poll on the ranking of Americans’ belief in five Spiritual Entities. The poll, taken intermittently since 2001, tracks popular support for the existence of God, Angels, Heaven, Hell and the Devil. As you may have guessed, support for the reality of each of these has fallen over the past two decades, but, because it’s my job to interpret things that are of little interest to others, I feel a need to dive more deeply into the data.

Headlines highlight the steep decline in people’s support for the exitance of God, over 15 points to 74% from their high in 2001 and 2004 when God swept the numbers with a 90% belief rate. What surprises me is not a whopping 25% of Americans tossing the Divine Creator into the ashbin of myth, but that belief in God was so high at the beginning of the 21st Century. Perhaps our being sustained through the predicted apocalypse of Y2K gave us a sense of gratitude for our planet’s survival, buoying our affirmation of an eternal sustainer. However that same sense of relief should have generated a spike in faith after the Cubs won the World Series in 2016. Alas, that same year God’s numbers skidded more than 11 points, suggesting a greater outbreak of atheism wrought by the Cardinals’ loss.  One might also have presumed a corresponding decline in our national support for Hell, which by all accounts completely froze-over that same year, but counterintuitively, Hell’s reality dropped a mere 5%.

Of course, this year in the great standoff between God and the Devil, Lucifer’s supporters constitute a laughable 58%, and his numbers  continue to lag behind the existence of Hell (59%) since 2007. Clearly a small percentage of the population recognize the existence of Hell without need for an overseeing headmaster; thinking back on my days in junior high, I sympathize. The existence of Heaven on the other hand is supported by 8% more Americans (67%) than is Hell, betraying our nation’s aspirational expectation for good personal outcomes. While Hell may be leaderless for some, a similar number of Americans believe Angels to be homeless, as a slightly larger percentage (68%) believe in their existence with or without a place to hang their harps.

The full report (linked above) breaks down the data by age, gender, income, education, religious affiliation and of course, political party. You may find it important to track what percentage of college educated Republican women between the ages of 35-54 with a household income between $40 and $100K believe in the existence of Hell; I do not. But the fact that you are able to track that data serves as the punchline to its own joke.

In the 22 years since Gallup began asking these questions, what has increased is the number of unsolicited phone surveys. Since the results sited above were gleaned from a set of Gallup telephone interviews conducted this past May, and telephone survey response rates now hover around 6% (see Pew Research phone survey response data here), the entire study should begin with, “Among those extremely small number of people who respond to random telephone surveys...” It is quite possible that belief in God among the general population is significantly higher, as those who affirm God’s existence tend to have much better things to do than stay on the phone with a Gallup survey taker.

With constant data dealers like Gallup, our national addiction to targeted information seems to be insatiable no matter how useless that data is. Even for one who works sales in the ‘belief biz’, such granular regressions strike me to be of little practical use, even though they are quickly retrievable. On the other hand, I’m clearly in the minority; 85% of clergy believe such numbers to be crucial to their ministries, a statistic I derived more quickly than conducting a telephone survey of 1,042 American pastors. With great confidence and high efficiency, I just made it up.

Running the numbers and keeping things odd, I remain

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor