Gallup Poll: "In U.S., 46% Hold Creationist View of Human Origins"

I found out about this recent poll, published on June 1, 2012, via a list serve to which I belong. Several list serve members, which include well-known climate change activists, journalists, academics, and scientists, were concerned that the poll did not bode well for dealing with climate change.  If half the American population is composed of people who believe that God created the world 10,000 years ago, how can climate scientists and activists persuade people to pay attention to human-caused climate change, given that such change is projected on the basis of complex scientific models? The poll raises questions for people interested in Integral Theory as well. Before turning to those, let’s review some of the poll’s findings. ¹

The poll asks people to identify which of three statements is closest to their views on the origin and development of human beings.

“A) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advance forms of life, but God guided this process, B) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process, C) God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.”

In 2012, 46% selected C), which amounts to “young-Earth creationism,” 32% selected A), which holds that human evolution occurs and is divinely guided in some way, and 15% chose B), which claims that human evolution occurs strictly on its own. (An explanation of why the total percentages add up to 93% can be found in the poll’s methodology section.) 78% of those interviewed refused to endorse the view that human evolution happens strictly according to natural processes.

One of the most striking facts about this poll is that the percentage of Americans (18 years old and over) selecting one or another of the three possible statements has varied little since 1982, when the Gallup organization began polling people.  The 2012 poll was the eleventh.  The average percentage of people adhering to a young-Earth creationism is 45% over those thirty years, so the most recent finding is consistent with that average.  There is no indication of “development” in the findings, except for a very gradual uptick in the percentage of people adhering to what might be called the naturalistic (or atheistic) statement. This percentage has gone from 9% in 1982 to 15% in 2012.

The Gallup pollsters observe that, unsurprisingly, people who are most religious (measured by frequency of church attendance) make up the highest percentage of people affirming young-Earth creationism. It is worth noting, however, that even among people attending church seldom or never, 38% believe in God-guided human evolution and 25% believe in young-Earth creation.

Among people with a postgraduate education, the findings are perhaps even more noteworthy. 42% of people with a postgraduate education adhere to God-guided idea of human evolution, while 25% of that population claims that God created humans and the rest of the world within the past 10,000 years. Less than a third (29%) of those with a postgraduate education hold to the naturalistic view of human evolution.

Possible concerns about the polling method should presumably be put to rest because of the Gallup organization’s expertise, and because the percentages have been so consistent for thirty years. Nevertheless, the findings are difficult for many educated people—including many of those reading this essay--to accept. That nearly half the U.S. population is composed of young-Earth creationists should give everyone some pause. Based on my own experience with teaching thousands of undergraduates over a span of four decades, I doubt that a significant percentage them are young-Earth creationists, but I have no evidence to back up such doubts. I would not be surprised to learn that half or more of them believe that God plays some role in the evolution of human beings. On the other hand, I can say with confidence that since I started teaching in 1974, students have become increasingly ignorant—appallingly so--about the basic contents of Biblical religion and its influence on Western history.  Last year, in a well-subscribed course on environmental ethics, for instance, I asked my students how many of them had heard of the Reformation, the Reformation, as in the origin of Protestantism. One student half-heartedly raised his hand. (Perhaps the end of the West really is nigh, or has in fact come and gone without anyone noticing.)

Let’s assume, however, that the poll provides a credible profile of American beliefs about the role that God did or did not play in human origins. What implications do these findings have for Integral Theory? Frequently, we hear that about 25% of the American population is premodern or fundamentalist, about 45% is modernist, and about 20% is postmodern (Green, New Age, etc.). If one defines “modern” as someone who adheres to basic scientific claims about the world, including the notion that humans evolved without divine intervention, then the Gallup poll suggests that 78% of the population is not modern.  That only 15% of the population holds the naturalistic view is especially striking. Clearly, Darwinian naturalism has not made much headway in the United States, even among the highly educated.  Of people with a college degree, 46% (!) believe that God created humans and the rest of the world only 10,000 years ago.

Is affirming young-Earth creationism enough to confirm that one’s center of gravity is fundamentalist/premodern? Perhaps not. Surely some of those who assented to creationism in the Gallup poll may be moving into a modern center of gravity, but still affirm religious views not easily reconcilable with modernist beliefs. Many American have always been suspicious of evolutionary theory. The famous Scopes trial changed nothing in this respect.

Leaving to others the difficult task of mapping the poll’s findings onto the premodern, modern, postmodern population distribution assumed by Integral Theory, I would like to explore the possible implications of the fact that almost 80% of Americans agree that God or Spirit either created humankind 10,000 years ago or else influenced the evolution of humankind. Here, it is instructive to consider the results of a 2011 Gallup poll, which revealed that 91% of Americans still believe in “God or a universal spirit.” In the 1960s this percentage stood at 98. Compared with Europe, where church attendance is minimal and atheism widespread, the American population retains a significant measure of faith, even if many people are increasingly un-churched and know little about the content of their faith.

Given the important role that the United States has played in modern history, and in the history of modernity, the enduring belief in God/Spirit among Americans is certainly worth pondering. America has remained comparatively religious for a number of complex reasons. One is that many of the early New England settlers were dissidents fleeing religious persecution in England. The American cultural-political imaginary, then, was informed from the start by the notion that America is exceptional, mandated to carry out a divine mission: to establish a country that will be a model unto the world. Public displays of faith by candidates continue to be ingredients in American political campaigns. Another reason for persistent American religiosity is the relative separation of church and state. Many European countries founded national churches, for example, the Church of England, a fact that has played a role in the long-term demise in European church attendance. Christianity has long been the predominant religion in the United States, but in recent decades religious tolerance (beyond the fundamentalist population) has grown considerably.

In the great ideological battles of the 20th century, the United States opposed what that country depicted as the God-less systems of National Socialism and Soviet Marxism. National Socialism and Soviet Marxism had much in common in some ways despite having major differences in other areas. Both regimes maintained that bourgeois subjectivity, that is, the individuality or personhood so prized among adherents of liberal modernity, had to be eliminated in favor of the good of the communal whole. Fascism and communism had appeal in this country during the Great Depression, but Nazi atrocities (for example, extermination campaigns carried out in death camps) and Soviet outrages (such the Gulag Archipelago), pushed fascism and communism to the political margins after World War II. The explicitly atheistic ideology of Soviet Marxism, and the anti-Semitic and anti-Christian attitudes of National Socialism cannot be divorced from the fact that these infamous regimes (not to mention communist China in the 1960s and 1970s) murdered tens of millions of people.

In recent years, a number of high profile atheists have railed against belief in God as an indication of human ignorance and as a source of vast human suffering. Such atheists would concede that Nazism and Soviet Marxism caused even more suffering than holy wars have caused, but perhaps this is because holy warriors merely lacked industrial technology, such as gas chambers and portable high explosives of the kind used by today’s suicide bombers. Arguably, Nazism and Soviet Marxism were quasi-religious movements, which came to power in the context of social and economic pressures that undermined, overwhelmed, and co-opted traditional religious institutions. Still, the demand that people just give up belief in God seems retrograde in the context of the astonishing resilience of religious belief despite modernist expectations to the contrary.  Moreover, some self-promoting atheists don’t seem to know much more about religion than a number of my undergraduates.  The beneficial, civilizing consequences of the religious that arose together during what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age are difficult to overestimate.

Religion has always been tied up with politics. As part of a long-term “Southern strategy,” for example, the Republican Party has wrapped itself in the blanket of Christian fundamentalism, a fact that has been a source of consternation and contempt on the part of liberal Democrats who seem clueless about the Gallup poll results being discussed here. Some readers are not old enough to remember the “progressive” roll played by Christian and Jewish clergy in the Civil Rights and anti-war movements in the 1960s and 1970s. At one time, Democrats and Republicans alike saw no problem in religious faith playing a role in public discourse. Integral Theory has rightly emphasized the need to respect healthy expressions of religious beliefs of people at all waves of development, from fundamentalist to atheist to New Age.

Atheism has made gradual headway in the United States, although if 90% of American still professes some sort of theism, atheism has a very long way to go before becoming a dominant viewpoint. Sometimes it is claimed that a principled atheism is a halfway house between renunciation of the premodern Biblical God, on the one hand, and the rise of a more sophisticated, postmodern view of Spirit, on the other. Perhaps, in other words, a healthy dose of atheism is what’s needed to move some people out of premodern fundamentalism into modernity, a stage that ostensibly must be attained and consolidated prior to moving to postmodernism and beyond.  But, such hallmarks of modernity as individuality, personal liberty, and property rights are central to American self-understanding. And 91% of Americans still believe in “God or a universal spirit.”  Hence, the notion that atheism is an indication of movement from premodern to modern attitudes is in need of scrutiny, at least as applied to the United States.  The American version of modernity includes a place for God or Spirit, even though what these terms mean is often contentious and inchoate. 

A crucial reason that most Americans still claim to believe in God or Spirit is that they refuse to adopt the naturalistic view, which—at bottom—claims that the universe in general and human life in particular are devoid of any ultimate purpose, meaning, or value. Americans are not alone in intuiting that there is cosmic significance to the fact that life arose at all, and even more so to the fact that self-conscious life emerged.  Belief in God is for many a way of articulating, with the most readily available traditional term, their conviction that life is not ultimately meaningless. 

I share their conviction.  

¹ Available at: http://www.gallup.com/poll/155003/hold-creationist-view-human-origins.aspx