UK religious beliefs are rather confused

Ligonier Ministries, the organisation set up by American theologian R C Sproul, has conducted an extensive survey of attitudes to core Christian beliefs in the UK.

Conducted by ComRes, the 2018 State of Theology survey asked a representative sample of UK adults and a separate sample of evangelical Christians what they believe about God, Jesus Christ and the Bible.

For the purposes of the survey, evangelicals are defined as those who hold to various key truths: the Bible is their authority; they encourage non-Christians to trust Jesus Christ as their Saviour; Jesus Christ’s death on the cross is the only sacrifice able to remove the penalty for sin; only those who trust in Jesus Christ alone as their Saviour receive God’s free gift of eternal salvation.

According to the survey, evangelicals in the UK make up about 2% of the population (compared to around 20% in the USA).

What the results show is that the majority of UK evangelicals report high levels of belief in the authority of the Bible but at the same time a quarter agree with statements about Scripture not being literally true and being disproved by science. There is also great misunderstanding about the eternal divine nature of Jesus Christ, and the personhood of the Holy Spirit. About 20% are equivocal on topics of marriage, morality and abortion.

This all confirms that we are in a post-Christian society with low levels of Biblical literacy in many churches.

This is a challenge for church leaders about how we teach the whole counsel of God. We need to preach the Bible story and all the truths that we learn from the Bible, and allow our people plenty of time to question, consider and establish their understanding of biblical revelation – to be always stretching them towards a better and clearer knowledge of God.

There is some encouragement from the survey for our evangelism: About half the general population either believe to some degree various fundamental truths about God, Jesus and the Bible or say they don’t know. Some of these people may be receptive to invitations to learn more about what the Bible teaches.

What is more challenging is that most people, around 70% of the population, say that abortion and sex outside of marriage are not sins. This means there will be resistance, even hostility, if we raise these topics. This does not mean we avoid controversial matters but we need God’s help to be wise about how and when we introduce them.  

Graham Nicholls is Director of Affinity

 

Graham spoke about this issue to TWR Newsdesk on Saturday 27 October: