It shouldn’t be a surprise that most US citizens lack a Biblical worldview. Relatively few of them, including many self-identified Christians and self-identified Jews, have any idea what the Bible actually says.
A new study by longtime evangelical Christian researcher George Barna finds that 94{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} of Americans do not hold a biblical worldview.
The study found that the most common worldview among Americans (88{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08}) might best be termed syncretism, said Barna, describing it as a “disparate, irreconcilable collection of beliefs and behaviors that define people’s lives.”
Barna’s American Worldview Inventory was conducted by the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University, which Barna directs.
The 2021 edition is the first of its kind to measure seven prominent worldviews: biblical theism, secular humanism, postmodernism, moralistic therapeutic deism, nihilism, Eastern Mysticism and Marxism, along with its offshoot, critical race theory.
But Barna found that no single worldview was embraced by a significant percentage of Americans.
“Syncretism is a cut-and-paste approach to making sense of life,” he explained. “Rather than developing an internally consistent and philosophically coherent perspective, Americans embrace points of view or actions that feel comfortable or most convenient. Those beliefs and behaviors are often inconsistent, or even contradictory, but few Americans seemed troubled by that.”
Syncretism is the only philosophy that is accessible to those whose minds are limited to rhetoric. This is why it’s so completely useless to attempt to communicate with them using dialectic. One might as reasonably resort to Japanese or Pig Latin.
And attempting to appeal to a syncretist’s sense of right and wrong is pointless. They don’t have any such sense.
