From Arizona Christian University comes a study which at first seems to be somewhat surprising, and perhaps to true believing Christians even shocking.

It claims that 60% of Americans no longer believe in God!

While that is music to my ears, the devil, of course, is in the details.

Alas, the details that it offers do not support such a sweeping statement.

First of all, what does it claim?

In its primary chart it purports to answer this: “How Important the God of the Bible Is in the Lives of Americans” and its headline result is labelled: “Don’t believe He exists, affects lives” with the total coming to a whopping 60%. It provides no data, only percentages, which is problematic already.

That 60% is further broken down into “Self-identified Christian” (47%) and “Theologically Identified, Born-Again Christian” (40%), whatever that means. Further on down those are divided into 42% Protestant and 56% Catholic.

And that’s all we ever hear about the 60% who supposedly don’t believe that God exists.

The rest of the survey is concerned only with the 40% of the folks who apparently do believe that a god exists and whether that god is important to them or not. Oh, yes, as this survey was done by a Christian university, they were only asking about the Christian god. No other gods need apply.

But I, of course, am only interested in that 60%.

At first glance this seems very strange. For example, adding up the percentages for the churches of the folks who don’t believe in a god (42 and 56) gives us 98%. Subtracting that from 100 gives us, oh, 2%.

Hmmm, the last time I looked, there were considerably more than 2% of the population that identified as atheist or no religion or other religion for that matter. So already I have a difficult time believing this survey.

Then I read the caption more carefully: “Don’t believe He exists, affects lives” 

Huh! In other words they’re lumping together folks who don’t believe that a god exists and those who might believe there is a god somewhere but that god doesn’t interfere in worldly affairs. Those are two very different things.

And that makes the whole survey completely worthless. Well, that’s one of the several things that makes its worthless.

Not surprising that a Christian university would screw up a Christian survey so badly. They’re more interested in pushing their agenda than in, you know, doing real research. It makes me wonder if it was the result of malice or stupidity. Given that they’re Christians, I suspect a bit of each.

According to Wikipedia Arizona Christian University is a

non-denominational, evangelical Christian institution where applicants are required to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and agree to take part in ACU’s spiritual formation activities, which include attending twice-weekly chapel services and taking 18 credit-hours of Bible. Upon application, students also acknowledge their agreement with the university’s statement of faith.

So it’s an evangelical institution. No big surprise there. Their purpose is to indoctrinate not to teach and certainly not to conduct rigorous scientific studies.

Go read it for yourself, it’s a PDF: Americans Minimize the Role of God in Their Life