What Do People Really Believe?

Earlier this year, the Barna Research group released the results of the 2024 American Worldview Inventory, where a national sample of adults across the US were surveyed to determine their specific worldview. This survey provides valuable insight because it asks specific questions to center onto the actual beliefs held by people as opposed to simply asking what religion they claim. While someone may check the box that they are “Christian,” he may not actually agree with certain fundamental Christian beliefs. For example, a person may attend a Christian church and operate within Christian social circles, but he may not believe the Bible is truly God’s Word and disagrees that Jesus is God. Therefore, he may state that he is a Christian but functionally he is not because he disagrees with fundamental Christian doctrine. Sadly, the survey tends to reveal this kind of disparity between those professing to be Christians and those who actually hold biblically based beliefs.

By posing those kinds of questions, this survey reveals the trends in our culture’s worldview, as opposed to simply trends in church membership. There may be an increase in attendance to a particular denomination or religion, but that doesn’t necessarily correlate to an increase in that worldview. It highlights the difference between religious affiliation and worldview. A person’s worldview is how he thinks about things like the origin of the universe, the meaning of life, what happens when we die, how we determine right and wrong, the nature of God, and the nature of humankind. The way a person answers these questions will actually drive his actions more than his associated religion will. It truly forms the way he views the world (thus the term, worldview).

The survey covered topics such as what forms the basis for truth, whether a god should be worshiped and given praise, whether the Bible is an authoritative and trustworthy guidebook for life, the moral stance on abortion and the value of human life, the existence of Satan, and even whether to reject or embrace the philosophy that you can do whatever you want as long as it doesn’t harm other people. These topics, along with many others, related to 14 different worldviews: Syncretism, Biblical Worldview, Mormonism, Nihilism, Postmodernism, Secular Humanism, Animism, Eastern Mysticism, Islam, Judaism, Marxism, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, Satanism, and Wicca. The sampling of worldviews ranged from monotheistic (one god), to polytheistic (multiple gods), to atheistic (no god), and varied on whether the truth and morality are god-based, self-based, or culture-based.

The results were very disheartening. The last eight worldviews listed above combined represented less than one percent of the population. Mormonism, Nihilism, Postmodernism, and Secular Humanism each represented only 1% of the people surveyed. The Biblical worldview represented only 4%. The remaining 92% of the adults surveyed adhere to a worldview described as Syncretism. In a culture where you’d be hard-pressed to find two adults to agree on anything, there are 92% that fall into the same worldview category; ironically, though, it’s a category that means they can’t agree on anything.

If this is the way a vast majority of Americans think, then what is syncretism anyway? Syncretism is the blending and merging of different religious beliefs or philosophies into one system. It would be like a religious buffet; I’ll take a little bit of Hinduism, some atheism and Darwinian evolutionary thought, maybe toss in a side of postmodernism, and top it off with a dash of Christianity. Clearly, for a large majority to be considered syncretic, this is what most people are doing to form their worldview – in fact 92% of all adults are doing this.

On the surface, this may seem to some a reasonable way to approach worldviews, taking the good parts from each philosophy to come up with one superior philosophy. There is a certain arrogance to this method though. Each person gets to decide for themselves what parts of each philosophy they deem to be the “best,” which could be different for each individual. So everyone gets to have their own set of unique beliefs that they deem to be best.

This approach is very “me” focused. Don’t like the Eightfold Path of Hinduism but love the concept of Buddha? Then keep the Buddha statues and ditch the rest. Don’t want to be restricted by a religious text and doctrine but want to feel spiritual? Then form your own beliefs about God and worship Him in whatever way makes you feel good. The syncretic approach to religion allows you to decide what God is all about and conform Him to your ideals, as opposed to the other way around.

Before you think that this is only being done by people outside of Christianity, it is important to note that while two-thirds (66%) of adult Americans identify as Christian, only 6% of them believe biblical doctrine; the rest of the adults who claim to be Christians do not actually hold to a biblical worldview. As the Barna report states, “Of the 170 million adults who self-identified as Christian, 92% are Syncretists.” Therefore, not only does a vast majority of the general population identify as this blending, merging of worldviews, but the vast majority of supposed Christians are Syncretists, blending and merging worldviews, mixing a little of this and a little of that in with their Christianity.

This isn’t anything new though. In the Old Testament, God warned the Israelites about this before they even entered into the Promised Land. The people living in the Promised worshiped all kinds of false gods, so God commanded the Israelites to not make covenants with them and to not intermarry with them. God warned that otherwise “they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly.” So God commanded them to “break down their altars and dash in pieces their pillars and chop down their Asherim and burn their carved images with fire. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God.” (Deuteronomy 7:2-6).

God knew that intermingling with these people who worshiped false gods would influence them in a negative way. Therefore, God ordered them to destroy the sacred things from the false religions, to tear down those altars, and burn up their idols in fire. He wanted those things demolished so that it would not lead them astray from worshiping the One True God. The Israelites failed to do that and later in the nation’s history we can see the effect it had on them.

As soon as the kingdom split after the death of Solomon, Jeroboam, the king of the Northern Kingdom Israel, decided to make his own rules of worship to prevent the Israelites from traveling down to Jerusalem to the temple. As recorded in 1 Kings 12:28-33, Jeroboam made two golden calves and set them up in two new temples he built. He then declared to the people that those would now be the gods for Israel, even stating that they were “who brought you up out of Egypt.”

Jeroboam then made temples on high places and appointed priests to run the temples, but these temples were not honoring God, and the priests were not from the tribe of Levi. He also appointed a feast on a certain day to mimic the Godly feasts that would be held in Judah, but the sacrifices for this feast were to the golden calves, not to God. As the text describes, he celebrated this feast that “he had devised from his own heart.” Jeroboam took the true worship of God and mixed in his own ideas about it, things he had devised from his own heart. God viewed this as an abomination. As a result, Jeroboam led the people away from following God, just like God had warned.

Most of the kings who followed Jeroboam were described as doing evil in the sight of the Lord. None of them walked in Godliness, nor did they follow the commands or statues of God. Most of them outright rejected God, which is bad enough, but many of them were worse. They mixed the worship of the One True God with their own false ideas of worship and the false ideas of god from the surrounding nations.

In 2 Kings 18:3-4, Hezekiah’s reign is described: “He [Hezekiah] did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, just as his father David had done. He removed the high places, smashed the sacred stones and cut down the Asherah poles. He broke into pieces the bronze snake Moses had made, for up to that time the Israelites had been burning incense to it. (It was called Nehushtan.).” While Hezekiah is praised for destroying this false worship, it shows how far the Israelites had strayed from the truth. They had taken the bronze snake that Moses made in the desert (see Numbers 21:6-9 for that account), and instead of worshiping the God who healed them, they were worshiping the bronze snake! They had combined their worship of God with the worship of false gods. The Israelites were practicing syncretism.

In 2 Kings 21:2-7, the reign of Manasseh over Judah is described. “He [Manasseh] did evil in the eyes of the Lord, following the detestable practices of the nations the Lord had driven out before the Israelites. He rebuilt the high places his father Hezekiah had destroyed; he also erected altars to Baal and made an Asherah pole, as Ahab king of Israel had done. He bowed down to all the starry hosts and worshiped them. He built altars in the temple of the Lord, of which the Lord had said, ‘In Jerusalem I will put my Name.’ In the two courts of the temple of the Lord, he built altars to all the starry hosts. He sacrificed his own son in the fire, practiced divination, sought omens, and consulted mediums and spiritists. He did much evil in the eyes of the Lord, arousing his anger.” Manasseh used the temple of the Lord to set up altars to his own false gods and conduct his own rituals and practices. He demonstrated syncretism as he intermingled the false religions around him with the worship of the God of the Bible.

Notice that the kings doing these things are neither praised in the Bible for worshiping God alongside other things nor upheld as a good example of adding new ideas for worship to the “old traditions.” Instead, they are described as doing evil. God eventually judges these kings for their idolatrous practices by allowing them to be conquered first by the Assyrians and then by the Babylonians.

While today the 92% syncretists who profess to be Christians are not setting up false idols on the altar inside the church, they are taking the parts of the Bible they like, discarding the parts they don’t like, and replacing it with some other philosophy. So maybe you like Jesus’ statement, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” but you don’t like His statement, “Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Me.” As a Syncretist, you can keep that part you like and replace the part about denying yourself with the postmodernist idea of “you do you.” Or maybe you keep the attribute that God is love, but you are uncomfortable with Jesus’ statement, “If you love Me, keep my commands.” So you form your own idea that God must love everything you do. Now you have a religion you can really commit to. And it’s all about you. You’ve mixed the philosophies you like together to form your own religion.

Even though the manifestation of syncretism is different between our culture and the nation of Israel in the Old Testament, God’s response to it is the same. It is doing evil in the sight of the Lord. As the Almighty God Creator of all things, He will not share His glory and the honor due only to Him with a false god.

However, regardless of someone’s view of the God, Jesus, and the Bible, syncretism fails on the basis of flawed logic. Each worldview assessed in this survey has a different concept of who god is, the nature of humanity, the origin of the universe, and what happens when we die. The ideas on these things from each worldview all contradict, therefore, they cannot all be true at the same time and in the same way. It violates the logic Law of Non-Contradiction. There cannot be no god (atheism or postmodernism), one solitary god (Islam), multiple gods (Hinduism), a spirit inhabited all objects (New Spirituality), and the Triune God (Biblical Christianity) all at the same time. Only one of those thoughts about the existence of God can be true. So to mix and match from each of these ideas is to take different aspects from false concepts and merge them into one giant false worldview.

Furthermore, if someone claims to be a Christian, he is stating that he believes Jesus is God. Yet all other worldviews claim something other than the deity of Jesus. In addition, Jesus claimed, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through Me.” By claiming to be a Christian, a person must believe that Jesus is the only way to the Father – Jesus certainly believed that. It would be the height of foolishness to borrow ideas from a worldview that directly contradicts the main point of Christianity.

So when a Christian incorporates other ideas of god, worship, the nature of sin and humanity, etc. into his “Christian” worldview, it brings into question whether he is truly a follower of Christ. A true follower of Christ would respond to alternate ideas and worldviews the way Peter responded to Jesus in John 6:68-69. When asked if the twelve also wanted to walk away from following after Jesus, Peter said, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” May that be the true Christian’s response to false ideas pedaled by Satan through other world religions and philosophies.