April 4, 2013
Barna Research Group reports that the number of American adults who view the Bible as “just…a book of stories and teachings written by men” has increased from 10% in 2011 to 17% in 2013. That’s a significant increase in just two years.
Read the entire report here.
February 14, 2013
From the Huffington Post:
According to new government reports, there are nearly 20 million new cases of sexually transmitted infections each year in this country.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that nearly half of these new infections occur in people between ages 15 and 24.
Researchers also found that there are 110,197,000 cases of STIs in total in the United States right now, including those occurring in people who newly contracted an infection and those who have been living with an infection. Young people between ages 15 and 24 make up more than 20 percent of the overall cases of both new and established infections.
Let me get this straight:
April 18, 2012
If you are like me, you thought reading books was becoming passe. Reading books is what people did in the old days before television and all of the various forms of entertainment we have today ruined people’s desire to read. Apparently that’s not the case. Book-reading is more popular than ever, perhaps due to increased education and the internet. It would be interesting to see how these figures break down based on age. I would still venture to say that teenagers read less today than they did in days past, but hey, I could be wrong about that too.
HT: Scot McKnight
November 2, 2011
The Barna Research Group has released a report containing six reasons young people leave church after age 15. This report is a summary of a book by David Kinnaman, president of Barna Group. You Lost Me: Why Young Christians are Leaving Church and Rethinking Church is based on eight national studies of teens who disengage from the Christian church/faith. Kinnaman discovered that the six major reasons teens leave church can be summarized under the following umbrellas (3 out of 5 teens disengage from the Christian church/faith for one or more of these reasons):
May 27, 2011
Gallup just released a new poll on abortion. Historically, more Americans have identified themselves as “pro-choice” than “pro-life.” This trend reversed in 2009. For example, last year 47% of American adults identified themselves as “pro-life,” and 45% identified themselves as “pro-choice.” The new poll indicates that the tables have reversed themselves again. Now a slight majority self-identify with the pro-choice label (49% vs 45%).
While labels are helpful in gauging public opinion, people have different understandings of what “pro-life” and “pro-choice” mean. For example, someone could understand these terms to refer to one’s position on the legality of abortion, in which case a person who is personally opposed to all abortion but thinks people should have the legal right to an abortion may identify as “pro-choice.” The real test of Americans’ views on abortion comes to light when more specific questions are asked. For example, when asked whether abortion is morally wrong, 51% agreed while only 39% disagreed. This confirms that many adopting the pro-choice label do so as a reflection of their political views related to abortion, not their moral views.
March 23, 2011
That is the finding of the Public Religion Research Institute. Not only do Catholics support same-sex marriage in higher numbers than other religious groups, but they even support same-sex marriage in higher numbers than the non-religious (even though the percentage of support for SSM is higher among the non-religious than Catholics–56% vs. 42%–since there are more Catholics than non-religious Americans, the actual number of Catholics who support SSM is higher than the number of non-religious citizens who support SSM).
According to PRRI: (more…)
March 10, 2011
The most recent polling data from the Pew Research Center has found that support same-sex marriage has risen to 45%, up from 42% last year. Opposition currently stands at 46%. As you can see from the chart, support for same-sex marriage has steadily increased, and opposition has steadily decreased since 1996. It doesn’t take a prophet to predict that unless social conservatives start making a persuasive case in the public square real quick, those who oppose same-sex marriage will be in the minority within two years. In some parts of the country (Northeast, West), this has already happened.
Support for abortion rights has also risen back to 2008 levels, after a substantial dip in 2009 (47% in 2009, 54% now). I have a feeling the dip in 2009 was due to some sort of sampling error. It seems too unlikely to me that public opinion would change so fast, and then change back just as quickly.
March 4, 2011
One of the distinct features of the canonical gospels is the amount of geographical and temporal details they contain. They do not just tell you the things Jesus said and did, but they tell you where and when He did them. This is in stark contrast to many of the Gnostic gospels such as The Gospel of Thomas which provide few (if any) details regarding geography and time.
I have spent a lot of time in the past six months studying and comparing the four Gospels. In the course of my studies, I noticed that certain evangelists seem to provide more geographical and temporal markers than other evangelists, so I thought it would be interesting to catalogue all of the geographical and temporal markers in the Gospels to determine who provided the most detail.
February 16, 2011
The National Council of Church’s report on church membership lists the following organizations as the top ten biggest religious denominations in the U.S.A.:
I was surprised by the large gap between the number one and number two slots, and I was astounded to learn that Mormonism is the 4th largest denomination in America.
HT: Theology in the News
January 13, 2011
The Pew Research Center released a major social trends report in November 2010 on the topic of marriage and family titled “The Decline of Marriage And Rise of New Families” (you may have heard about the cover article on this report featured in Time magazine). They attempted to evaluate how Americans’ views of marriage have changed over the last 50 years.[1] Some of their findings merely confirmed what most see as common knowledge, but some of their findings were quite surprising.
It took me a number of lunch breaks to read through the report, but it was well worth the time spent seeing how it is chalked full of valuable social statistics. While I would encourage you to read the full report, here are some of the most significant findings (organized by subject):
January 10, 2011
A recent survey in England revealed that 64% of women want a husband who makes more money than them, and 69% would prefer to stay home to be a full-time mother if they were financially able to do so.
I bet the only people surprised by this are social liberals who thought that if you tell a woman long enough that a successful business career will be more meaningful to her than raising a family, she will believe it. Apparently women aren’t buying it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying a woman who wants to work outside the home should not do so. But that is not where most women find their fulfillment in life. God designed men and women differently. Most women find their greatest fulfillment in caring for and raising a family, while most men find their greatest fulfillment in being productive in industry for the benefit of their families. That’s just human nature, and it can’t be socially engineered otherwise.
December 28, 2010
A new Gallup poll reveals Americans’ views on creation:
The number of theistic evolutionists has not changed much over the past 30 years, while there has been a slight decrease in the number of creationists (down from 47% in 1993) and a slight increase in the number of naturalists/atheists (up 7% from 1982).
One of the weaknesses of this poll is that it presents these three views as if they were the only options. Jay Richards wrote a short post elaborating on this point. Nevertheless, it does illustrate an important point: the vast majority of Americans do not buy into the materialistic paradigm of Darwinism.
October 28, 2010
That’s what AOL News claims based on an article in the journal Pediatrics. Kevin DeYoung smelled something fishy about this surprising statistic, so did a little investigating and found out that the claim is based on a misreading of the journal article. DeYoung writes:
AOL speaks of 1 in 10 teens; the original article concludes 9.3% of sexually active adolescents reported a same-sex partner. There’s a big difference. The survey analyzed data from 17,220 teenagers. Of those, 7,261 (or 42%) reported having had sex. So according this study 58% of teens are not having sex with anyone and 9.3% of those have, had same-sex partners, or 3.9% of the total sample.
October 27, 2010
Many proponents of same-sex marriage assume that opposition to same-sex marriage comes almost exclusively from religious citizens. A simple math calculation exposes the error of this assumption: religious believers account for approximately 95% of the population, and yet only 48% oppose same-sex marriage (41% favor). Clearly not all opposition to same-sex marriage is coming from religious believers. Who, then, is it coming from?
August 21, 2010
Elaine Howard Ecklund has written a book titled Science vs Religion: What Scientists Really Think. A summary of her research findings was published in USA Today (July 19, 2010): “Myths Widen the Science-Religion Divide.”
Ecklund surveyed 1,700 natural and social scientists and conducted interviews with 275 of them. She found that: (more…)
