God is Alive and Well in America
This article on the Pew Research Center says it all:
Forty years ago this month, Time magazine published one of its most famous and controversial covers. Splashed in bold red print across a black background was a short, simple and yet intensely provocative question: "Is God Dead?"
Without providing a definitive answer, the authors of the piece, dated April 8, 1966, seemed to imply that the idea of an omnipotent creator could be heading for history's dustbin. The spread of communism, they pointed out, meant that nearly half of the world's population lived "in thralldom to a brand of totalitarianism that condemns religion," while "in the traditional citadels of Christendom, grey Gothic cathedrals stand empty, mute witnesses to a rejected faith." Even in the United States -- where, the authors acknowledged, "faith in God seems to be as secure as it was in medieval France" -- many theologians were openly concerned about "the quality and character of contemporary belief." As the eminent historian Martin Marty observed at the time, "too many pews are filled on Sunday with practical atheists -- disguised nonbelievers who behave during the rest of the week as if God did not exist."
But four decades after the Time article was first published -- and nearly 125 years after the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche first famously declared that "God is dead" -- reports of the Almighty's demise appear to have been greatly exaggerated. For although religious faith and observance certainly have declined sharply in Europe, belief in God as well as attendance at religious services have remained strong in the United States and much of the rest of the world.
In fact, the existence of God is one of the few things almost all Americans consistently agree on. Recent polling by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that 96% of the public says they believe in God or some form of Supreme Being, roughly the same number as in a 1965 survey cited in the Time piece.
This is not to suggest that religious belief and observance in the United States were unaffected by the decay of organized religion noted in the Time piece. The number of Americans who think of themselves as "secular" has grown noticeably in the past 40 years. According to the General Social Survey (GSS), which has been asking Americans about their religious preferences since 1972, the number of those expressing no religious preference has doubled, from just under 7% in the 1970s to just over 14% at the beginning of the 21st century. And the number of Americans who report attending religious services only once a year or less has increased as well, from 34% in the 1970s to nearly 40% by the turn of the millennium.>> continued
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