The Story: A recently released poll finds an increasing number of Americans deny the reality of spiritual beings such as God, angels, and demons.
The Background: Belief in God, the Devil, and other spiritual realities has reached a new low in the U.S. According to a recent Gallup poll, the percentages of Americans who believe in God, angels, heaven, hell, and the Devil have decreased by 3 to 5 percentage points since 2016.
Despite the decline, the majority still believe in each of these entities, with 74 percent believing in God, 69 percent believing in angels, 67 percent believing in heaven, 59 percent believing in hell, and 58 percent believing in the Devil.
Compared to 2001, belief in God and in heaven have decreased the most, by 16 points each.
Since then, belief in hell has also fallen by 12 points and belief in the Devil and in angels have decreased by 10 points each. Altogether, 51 percent of Americans believe in all five spiritual entities, 11 percent don’t believe in any of them, and 7 percent are unsure about all of them.
Overall, the belief in spiritual entities has decreased among all age groups, but fewer people aged 18 to 34 believe in each of the five concepts compared to other age groups. Protestants are more likely than Catholics to believe in each of the five entities, and the majority of adults who attend religious services at least monthly believe in each of the five concepts.
Political affiliation correlates with these beliefs. Between 78 and 87 percent of Republicans believe in the five entities, while 51 to 68 percent of independents do. In comparison, only 56 to 66 percent of Democrats believe in God, angels, and heaven, but less than half believe in hell and the Devil.
What It Means: Why is belief in spiritual entities on the decline? A primary reason is that there’s been a seismic shift in epistemic authority.
When someone is recognized as having epistemic authority on a particular topic, it means he or she is considered a reliable and trustworthy source of information or insight regarding that topic. In the past, epistemic authority was largely rooted in a shared sense of reality and in deference to an authority that might have a clearer understanding of reality. For instance, if a child told us that babies were delivered by a stork and a mother told us that a baby came from her womb, we’d trust the mother’s account. We recognize she has a clearer understanding of the reality concerning where babies come from.
For many areas of knowledge, epistemic authority remains dominant. Yet it’s rapidly ceding ground to metaphysical subjectivism.
Metaphysics is the study of the fundamental nature of reality, and metaphysical subjectivism is a philosophical position concerning the nature of reality. Adherents don’t deny there’s such a thing as reality. What they assert is that much of what we consider real or true is constructed or conditioned by our perceptions, beliefs, or other subjective experiences. Reality isn’t something “out there” that exists independently of our minds but is instead shaped or even brought into existence by our subjective experiences.
Stated so directly, metaphysical subjectivism seems so absurd that no one could truly believe it. Yet consider the 1992 Supreme Court case about abortion, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. That ruling contained one of the clearest and most influential assertions of metaphysical subjectivism ever to be uttered in public. In defending the “right” to abortion, Justice Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
Kennedy, like many Americans, assumes metaphysical subjectivism to be self-evident. According to the former justice, basic metaphysical concepts such as the nature of being (existence), ethics (meaning), the material world (universe), and thoughts, emotions, and behaviors (the mystery of human life) were defined by the individual. Indeed, the right to define for oneself the nature of reality is, for him, the fundamental right necessary for free thought and action.
Of course, Kennedy never applied metaphysical subjectivism consistently—nor could he. The concept is absurd and thus unlivable. Kennedy’s view denies that reality requires consensus and claims anyone can decide what it is for herself. Yet to even have civil law—and thus a need for Supreme Court rulings—there must be some minimal consensus about reality.
No one can be a consistent metaphysical subjectivist without contradicting himself. Yet within metaphysical subjectivism, self-contradiction is only “real” if someone agrees it is, so you can avoid the reality of being incoherent and contradictory by simply refusing to accept that reality. You can ignore the self-contradiction and rely instead on “your truth.”
The dominant example of this self-contradictory, reality-redefining power of metaphysical subjectivism is the transgender movement. It appears to have sprung up almost out of nowhere. But Americans didn’t just wake up one day and say, “Men can be women too.” No, it took decades of rejecting epistemic authority and replacing it with internal authority. It happened when people stopped laughing at the phrase “my truth” and started treating such radical internal subjectivity as intellectually respectable.
That’s why we shouldn’t be surprised by this Gallup poll. If God, angels, demons, heaven, and hell are real—and, of course, they are—they possess an existential threat to the idea that truth is based on a person’s feelings. As metaphysical subjectivism gains ground, we should expect to see a proportionate decline in the belief in God and other supernatural beings.
What can be done? Ultimately, there’s only one solution to the problem: Americans must be persuaded to exchange metaphysical subjectivism for the epistemic authority of the Bible and the person to whom Scripture points, Jesus Christ.
Jesus is the source of all creation, the One through whom all reality—including angels, demons, heaven, and hell—was created (Col. 1:16–17). Our objective should therefore be not to encourage our neighbors to embrace a generic God with fill-in-the-blank attributes but to embrace the One who is “the way, and the truth, and the life’ (John 14:6). It’s only when we recognize the authority of the Truth that we can truly understand why the internally subjective “my truth” is a worthless idol.