Loss of Faith

While U.S. currency says “In God We Trust,” only half of U.S. adults have certainty about God’s existence.

When asked about their confidence in God’s existence, 50% say they know God exists and have no doubts, according to the latest General Social Survey (GSS). In 1993, 65% of Americans said they were certain God existed, and the percentage has been sliding down ever since.

Belief in God has particularly fallen among young adults. In 1993, 63% of 18- to 34-year-olds knew God existed with no doubts. Today, just 36% have the same confidence. Other age demographics have fallen, but not to the same extent. Belief in the divine among 35- to 49-year-olds is down to 49%. While the percentage of those 50 and older who have complete confidence in God’s existence remains higher than other age groups, it has dropped to 58%.

Belief in God among upper-class Americans has actually increased over the past two decades, from 49% to 53%. But it has declined in every other class designation. Middle-class belief is down from 62% in 1993 to 44%. Working-class belief has declined from 67% to 54%. And lower class belief has dropped from 75% to 57%.

By 2018, country artist Walker Hayes had gotten sober but then tragedy struck. He and his wife, Laney, lost their seventh child, Oakleigh, at birth. It's a moment he now recognizes as a "real test down here on earth." He described it by saying, "Just holding a lifeless child. It's indescribable. I can't imagine a worse pain." He admits that for a moment, his sobriety was in jeopardy. "I'd been sober for three years when we lost Oakleigh. I was ready to not be. As soon as that happened, I was like, this is why you drink."

The loss of Oakleigh is what Hayes credits with helping him find his faith. He said, “When we lost Oakleigh, I would have called myself an atheist.” Hayes said that he grew up in a Southern Baptist church but that as a rebellious child he did not connect with religion. He grew to resent it. But when faced with a kind of grief he'd never experienced before, things began to change. "I think I found out in a roundabout way that I was screaming at somebody. I would have called myself an atheist, but I was looking for someone to blame."

But it wasn't just one thing that suddenly brought him to church. Laney had befriended a fellow mom and that mom invited the family to her and her husband's new church. Hayes said that although he went in kicking and screaming, he suddenly felt the opposite of how he'd felt in church before.

But the final push came while reading a book late one night on his tour bus. "By the grace of God somebody recommended a book to Laney called Secrets of an Unlikely Convert by Rosaria Butterfield. This woman's testimony, it's exactly like mine except I hadn't surrendered yet … I wolfed this book down. I finished it by the time the sun came up.”

Hayes explained that he didn't "come to Christ" that morning but rather he bought a Bible and began to read on his own and learn. Slowly, his faith was restored. But he is confident that the catalyst for this huge awakening in his life was a direct result of immeasurable loss. He said, “I know for some reason losing Oakleigh led me to Christ. I would not know Jesus if I had not known the loss of my daughter. That's what it took for me.”

The vast majority of US adults believe in God, but the 81% who do so is down six percentage points from 2017 and is the lowest in Gallup's trend. Between 1944 and 2011, more than 90% of Americans believed in God. Gallup's May 2022 Values and Beliefs poll finds 17% of Americans saying they do not believe in God.

Gallup first asked this question in 1944, repeating it again in 1947 and twice each in the 1950s and 1960s. In those latter four surveys, a consistent 98% said they believed in God. When Gallup asked the question nearly five decades later, in 2011, 92% of Americans said they believed in God.

A subsequent survey in 2013 found belief in God dipping below 90% to 87%, roughly where it stood in three subsequent updates between 2014 and 2017 before this year's drop to 81%.

The groups with the largest declines are liberals (62%), young adults (68%), and Democrats (72%). Belief in God is highest among political conservatives (94%) and Republicans (92%), reflecting that religiosity is a major determinant of political divisions in the US.

The bottom line is that fewer Americans today, than five years ago, believe in God, and the percentage is down even more from the 1950s and 1960s when almost all Americans did. Still, the vast majority of Americans believe in God. And while belief in God has declined in recent years, Gallup has documented steeper drops in church attendance, church membership, and confidence in organized religion, suggesting that the practice of religious faith may be changing more than basic faith in God.

Author Meghan O'Gieblyn, explores meaning, morality, and faith. She recalls the role of thinking and reason during her days at Bible College:

When I was a Christian, I had a naive, unquestioning faith in the faculty of higher thought, in my ability to comprehend objective truths about the world. ... People often decry the thoughtlessness of religion, but when I think back on my time in Bible school, it occurs to me that there exist few communities where thought is taken so seriously. We spent hours arguing with each other—in the dining hall, in the campus plaza—over the finer points of predestination or the legitimacy of covenant theology.

Beliefs were real things that had life-or-death consequences. A person’s eternal fate depended on a willingness to accept or reject the truth—and we believed implicitly that logic was the means of determining those truths. Even when I began to harbor doubts…. I maintained an essential trust in the notion that reason would reveal to me the truth.

Today, no longer a believer, she has her doubts:

I no longer believe in God. I have not for some time. I now live with the rest of modernity in a world that is “disenchanted.” ... I live in a university town, a place that is populated by people who consider themselves called to a “life of the mind.” Yet my friends and I rarely talk about ideas or try to persuade one another of anything. It’s understood that people come to their convictions by elusive forces: some combination of hormones, evolutionary biases, and unconscious needs. Twice a week I attend a yoga class where I am instructed to “let go of the thinking mind.”

The Springtide Research Institute recently surveyed more than 10,000 Americans ages 13 to 25 (Generation Z) about their religious views and involvement. What surprised the researchers are the views of those who claim to be affiliated with a mainstream religion.

Josh Packard, executive director of Springtide, reveals: “They’re checking the box that says they are Jewish or Catholic or whatever, but over half of them are saying, ‘even though I checked the box, I don’t trust organized religion.’ This is sort of stunning and not what you would expect from somebody who checked the box.”

The report advises more one-on-one mentoring between adults and youth:

They also respond to “relational authority,” which means authority that is not based on hierarchy or titles so much as a genuine interest in young people as individuals. 4 in 5 Gen Z members surveyed said they were likely to take guidance from adults who care about them.

The report pinpoints five values that characterize this relational authority: listening, transparency, integrity, care, and expertise. (Expertise comes last on the list intentionally, because 65% of young people say an adult’s expertise doesn’t matter unless the adult cares for them. Listening comes first in establishing a genuine, non-transactional relationship.)

Oscar Isaac, the dashing X-Fighter pilot Poe Dameron of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, was raised in an evangelical household. "My dad was a man of extremes," he told GQ magazine. "So if God spoke to my father one day and said we were not supposed to have a TV in the house, it was suddenly gone." Isaac, who would play the father of Jesus in the 2006 The Nativity Story, did not have the faith of his father. He describes his religious separation as a "slow amputation." Dameron says religion is akin to the acting experience:

A director is always thinking, "What is the right combination of words that I can say that will unlock the right response in you? If I can say the right thing, it will unlock this thing in you, but if I say it wrong, the opposite will happen." Religion is a very similar thing. Like, somebody was meditating long enough that they put the right sentence together and thought, "If you say these words in exactly this way, you'll know how to live, but you have to say it exactly like this."

The great British physicist Stephen Hawking has emerged in recent years as a poster boy for atheism, especially in light of his heroic struggles against Lou Gehrig's disease. But the new film about Hawking's life, A Theory of Everything has been called a "God-haunted movie."

In one of the opening scenes, the young Hawking meets Jane, his future wife, and tells her that he is a cosmologist. "What's cosmology?" she asks, and he responds, "Religion for intelligent atheists." "What do cosmologists worship?" she asks. And he replies, "A single unifying equation that explains everything in the universe." In another scene Jane asks, "So, I take it you've never been to church?" When Stephen replies "Once upon a time," she asks, "Tempted to convert?" Stephen replies, "I have a slight problem with the celestial dictatorship premise."

Later on in the film, Jane challenges him: "You've never said why you don't believe in God." Hawking counters, "A physicist can't allow his calculations to be muddled by belief in a supernatural creator," to which she responds, "Sounds less of an argument against God than against physicists." In one of her two published memoirs, the real Jane Hawking argued, "However far-reaching our intellectual achievements … without faith [in God] there is only isolation and despair, and the human race is a lost cause"

This spirited back and forth continues throughout the film as Hawking settles more and more into a secularist view and Jane persists in her Christian beliefs.

Possible Preaching Angles: The movie does not come to any hard and fast conclusions about faith and doubt, but it does provide an interesting way to set up a sermon on worldviews, atheism, secularism, or faith and doubt.

On an episode of Saturday Night Live, the comedian Louis C.K. shared his beliefs about the impossibility of atheism:

I'm not religious. I don't know if there is a god. That's all I can say honestly. I don't know. Some people can say that they know there isn't a god. That's a weird thing you can say you know. "There's no god." "Are you sure?" "Yea, there's no god." "How do you know?" "Because I didn't see him."

"But how do you know? There's a vast universe. You can see for about 100 yards when there's not a building in the way. How can you possibly know? Did you look everywhere? Did you look in the downstairs bathroom?" "No, I haven't seen him yet." "Well, I haven't seen [the film] 12 Years as a Slave yet, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist."

In our time we cannot over-emphasize that theology can never be the object of faith. Anyone who fails to acknowledge this exposes himself to the severe criticism which [Martin] Buber made of Christianity. When a theology is made the object of faith, faith becomes the rationalistic acceptance of truths. On the other hand theology has a task to prevent faith from becoming completely irrational.

Several years ago, my father passed away at 88 years of age. During his last adult years, my father lived with us in Texas. Before that he lived in New York City. His family lived in an area of New York called Harlem, in a section of Harlem called Mouse Town, a neighborhood that Reader's Digest said was the toughest section in the United States. The two years before my father came to live with us in Dallas, he was beaten up twice by thugs. Once he was knocked down two flights of stairs and went to the hospital. The second time he was beaten up, he developed a hernia.

My father didn't know what the hernia was, and being a man of simple, perhaps even simplistic faith, he asked God to heal him. But nothing happened. When he finally wrote to me to tell me what had occurred, it was obvious that he was deeply upset. I received his letter in the morning, and by that afternoon I was on a plane to New York. A day or two later, I brought my father back to Texas, where the surgeons successfully operated on him.

My father felt that somehow God had let him down. He had prayed for healing, and the healing had not occurred. I tried to explain to my father that the hand of the physician was the hand of God, but he shrugged all of that off, and the last eight years of my father's life were not good ones. Not only were these years a time of declining health, but he went through them with a diminished faith.

Half the time the difficulty with daily prayer is not a lack of time, but assumptions about prayer that belong in the dipsy-dumpster. The other half of the time, neglect of daily prayer is due not to lack of time, but to being either a religious fraidy-cat or a spiritually lackadaisical Christian.