A fourth of self-identified Christians don\u2019t believe fully in the biblical description of God, according to the Pew Research Center.<\/p>\n
Rather, 25 percent of American Christians believe in what Pew described as \u201cGod or another higher power\u201d who is not necessarily all-loving, omniscient and omnipotent as Scripture reveals.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn total, three-quarters of U.S. Christians believe that God possesses all three of these attributes — that the deity is loving, omniscient and omnipotent,\u201d Pew found in the study of about 4,750 Americans released April 25.<\/p>\n
Eighty percent of Christians told Pew they believe in the biblical God, but not all of them believed in the three godly characteristics Pew identified. Other biblical characteristics of God, such as mercy and grace, were not specified in the study\u2019s questions.<\/p>\n
Many of those who described themselves as Christians are confused about who God is and what qualifies a person as Christian, Southern Baptist theologian R. Albert Mohler Jr. said in the April 26 edition of his podcast, The Briefing .<\/p>\n
\u201cHere we are being told that a significant number of those who identify as Christians say that they don\u2019t believe in the God of the Bible,\u201d Mohler said. \u201cSome of them, even if just 1 percent, when we\u2019re talking about the numbers involved here, say that they are Christians, but they don\u2019t believe in any higher power at all.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt means, by the way, that not only are they not Christians, they\u2019re not even theists,\u201d Mohler said of self-described Christians who don\u2019t even believe in a higher power.<\/p>\n
Most Christians, 93 percent, believe \u201cGod or another higher power in the universe\u201d loves all people regardless of their faults, 87 percent believe God is omniscient or all-knowing, and 78 percent believe God is omnipotent or all-powerful.<\/p>\n
The 75 percent of Christians who said they believe in all three of the identified characteristics of the biblical God was higher than the total found in the greater population, 56 percent of which reported such a belief. In all, 90 percent of Americans believe in a higher power not necessarily described as the biblical God.<\/p>\n
Among other findings:
\n \u2022 91 percent of black Protestants and 87 percent of white evangelicals believe God has all three traits, compared to 62 percent of mainline Protestants and 61 percent of Catholics.<\/p>\n
\u2022 56 percent of Jews and 53 percent of religiously unaffiliated \u201cnones\u201d told Pew they don\u2019t believe in the biblical God but do believe in a higher power or spiritual force in the universe.<\/p>\n
\u2022 75 percent of American adults, including Christians and the general population, say they try to talk to God, but not all of them consider the conversations the same as prayer.<\/p>\n
\u2022 39 percent of Americans who said they never or seldom pray said they talk to God just the same.<\/p>\n
\u2022 3 percent of agnostics say they believe in the biblical God.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A fourth of self-identified Christians don\u2019t believe fully in the biblical description of God, according to the Pew Research Center. Rather, 25 percent of American Christians believe in what Pew described as \u201cGod or another higher power\u201d who is not necessarily all-loving, omniscient and omnipotent as Scripture reveals. \u201cIn total, three-quarters of U.S. Christians believe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1098,1100,1099,1091],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7984"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7984\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}