Reflections on Religious Knowledge Survey II

In my previous blog, I argued that the United States is a mission field. The fact that 86% of Americans believe in a God (or higher power) indicates an open door for conversation. Some might argue that such a high figure indicates we are not a mission field--that most are already believers.

However, there are disturbing indications that this belief might not point to what evangelicals would consider “true believers.” This number would include those of other belief systems or a generalized personal spirituality. The latter possibility is one that I encounter with increasing frequency in my college teaching. Though this evidence is anecdotal, I suspect it reflects a growing trend of “buffet-style” spirituality where the individual picks and chooses aspects of religious belief from various sources to create a customized religious system for themselves.

Perhaps most troubling to me is the number of those who self-identified as Protestant or Roman Catholic but who did not understand the basic concepts of their tradition concerning how one accesses the grace of God.

In the Roman Catholic tradition, the grace of God is mediated through the church and its sacraments to the believer. The most prominent of the sacraments is the Eucharist in which the bread and wine are transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ. By receiving the sacrament in faith, grace and forgiveness is communicated to the believer through the medium of the host (the bread and wine). Only 55% of the Roman Catholics in the survey knew this belief. While I personally disagree with the theology, my point is that less than half of those surveyed knew what their own tradition teaches about salvation!

The Protestant result is worse. Only 19% of the Protestants surveyed understood the basic Protestant principle of salvation by faith apart from works. The idea of sole fide (faith alone) is a basic tenet of Protestant theology and stood at the very point of the separation from Rome. Yet, contemporary American Protestants do not understand what their own tradition teaches about salvation—a number lower that the Roman Catholic respondents! In my own personal observations in the classroom and in my church work, anecdotal as it might be, I believe this number to be correct.

While a direct connection cannot be made (theological acuity is not necessary for salvation), if a person does not understand what his/her own tradition teaches about the path to God, should we assume they are, indeed, saved simply because they believe there is a God? At the very least, it is an indictment of the failure of the church to disciple its members.