New Findings from Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s Global Survey of Evangelical Protestant Leaders

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has just released its Global Survey of Evangelical Protestant Leaders. The following excerpts present notable findings from the survey’s Executive Summary:

U.S. evangelical leaders are especially downbeat about the prospects for evangelical Christianity in their society; 82% say evangelicals are losing influence in the United States today, while only 17% think evangelicals are gaining influence.

Overall, evangelical leaders around the world view secularism, consumerism and popular culture as the greatest threats they face today. More of the leaders express concern about these aspects of modern life than express concern about other religions, internal disagree-ments among evangelicals or government restrictions on religion.

Of the nearly 2,200 evangelical leaders surveyed by the Pew Forum, about seven-in-ten (71%) see the influence of secularism as a major threat to evangelical Christianity in the countries where they live. Two-thirds (67%) also cite “too much emphasis on consumerism and material goods” as a major threat to evangelicalism, and nearly six-in-ten (59%) put “sex and violence in popular culture” into the same category. In addition, nearly two-thirds of the global evangelical leaders (64%) say there is a “natural conflict” between being an evangelical and living in a modern society.

Conflict between religious groups, by contrast, does not loom as a particularly large concern for most of the evangelical leaders surveyed. A majority says that conflict between religious groups is either a small problem (41%) or not a problem at all (14%) in their countries – though a sizeable minority considers it either a moderately big problem (27%) or a very big problem (17%). Those who live in the Middle East and North Africa are especially inclined to see inter-religious conflict as a moderately big (37%) or very big problem (35%). Nine-in-ten evangelical leaders (90%) who live in Muslim-majority countries say the influence of Islam is a major threat, compared with 41% of leaders who live elsewhere.

On the whole, the evangelical Protestant leaders express favorable opinions of adherents of other faiths in the Judeo-Christian tradition, including Judaism, Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. But of those who express an opinion, solid majorities express unfavorable views of Buddhists (65%), Hindus (65%), Muslims (67%) and atheists (70%). Interestingly, the leaders who live in Muslim-majority countries generally are more positive in their assessments of Muslims than are the evangelical leaders overall.

The leaders are nearly evenly split on whether the Bible should become the “official law of the land” in their countries; 48% oppose making the Bible the law of the land, while 45% favor it. By a more than three-to-one margin (74% vs. 21%), however, evangelical leaders surveyed say it is acceptable to them if their country’s political leaders have a different religion than their own.

JFB