A new poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that most Americans believe in God, prayer, higher authority, and angels.
Susan Garrett, an authority on angels and a professor of the New Testament at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Kentucky, finds the AP-NORC poll’s universal acceptance of angels believable.
Seventy-two percent of those polled also trust the power of prayer, and the same number also believe in heaven. Seventy-nine percent of Americans believe in God or a higher power, and sixty-three percent believe in karma, according to surveys.
Only 14% of individuals do not believe in God or a higher power, whereas 86% of those who think there are things that science or nature cannot explain do believe in God.
Forty-four percent of those who do not think there are things science and nature cannot explain are religious.
Garrett’s argument is consistent with previous research. Even though more and more Americans are abandoning organized religion, she says the United States remains a society with deep religious views. She notes that angels may be shaped in a variety of ways. She said people’s conceptions of angels tend to be as muddled as the devil’s.
Angels may be accommodated within various worldviews, including those that vary significantly in their ideas on the nature of God, the afterlife, the nature of the universe, and so on.
According to Garrett, abstract ideas that are difficult to describe in words are commonly brought up in conversations about angels. A large fraction of adults in the United States hold the view that angels exist. Among them are 94% of evangelical Protestants, 81% of mainstream Protestants, and 82% of Catholics, making up 84% of religiously affiliated individuals. In addition, 33% of persons who do not identify with any religion also believe that angels exist.
And among those who believe in angels but don’t belong to any specific religion, this includes 2% of atheists, 25% of agnostics, and 50% of those who identify as “nothing in particular.”
America keeps the faith.
