Kerby Anderson
What does the word “Christian” mean these days? It doesn’t seem to mean very much. The last few reports from George Barna’s Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University reveal that a very small percentage of American Christians have a Christian worldview.
Nearly seven in ten (69%) of Americans self-identify as Christian. Yet only about 4 percent of Americans have a Christian worldview. George Barna explains, “Christian has become somewhat of a generic term rather than a name that reflects a deep commitment to passionately pursuing and being like Jesus Christ.”
The self-identified Christians may embrace many basic doctrines of the Christian faith, but then diverge on one or more important issues. For example, a significant number deny the idea of objective truth rooted in Scripture. They deny the existence of absolute truth, and thus make their decisions based upon relative ethics and personal experience
Most Christians may say they believe in the Bible and the gospel message. But they also indicated on their surveys they believe people are basically good. Of course, if people believe they are good, then they may not believe in sin and the need for a savior.
If you look at the cultural issues, you find even more discrepancies between their views and a Christian worldview. These differences in biblical beliefs will then manifest themselves in the widely divergent views today among American Christians on questions of morality and politics. This includes divergent views on sex, marriage, family, and abortion. Those, in turn, affect how American Christians vote on candidates and key political issues.
If you are a pastor or Bible teacher, you need to get back to the basics. It is likely that many of the people you teach do not have a Christian worldview. They need your biblical teaching and biblical discipleship.

Kerby Anderson
Each year I teach second-year students at a bible school a class on homosexuality. One of the questions we discuss is what percentage of the population is homosexual. I quote from studies done by the University of Chicago and the Alan Guttmacher Institute which put the percentage around 2 percent. Then I show the students a Gallup poll that found US adults estimated that 25 percent of Americans are gay and lesbian. Of course, those estimates are off by an order of magnitude.
We now have articles quoting the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System of the CDC that estimates that only 75 percent of American high-school students now identify as heterosexual. The headlines and articles therefore claim that 25 percent are LGBTQ.
In a recent commentary, Wilfried Reilly raises some significant questions. First, “there is simply no genetic or biological explanation for a surge like this one.” This is significantly different from the many studies I have quoted in the past.
Attempts to argue that this is due to “increased social tolerance for gays” does not hold either, especially when you consider that many other European countries have been even more tolerant of LGBTQ. I think a better explanation is social contagion, which I have discussed in relation to transgenderism in previous commentaries.
Andrew Sullivan is a prominent gay columnist and provides this answer. “The most plausible explanation is that everyone wants to be LGBTQ now — so why not lie and be cool? Only problem is that this makes the LGBTQ community majority straight.” As you can tell, he doesn’t believe the 25 percent headlines and doesn’t think this is helpful to his gay agenda.
There is no reason to believe the 25 percent claim. It reminds me of the Gallup poll estimate from many years ago.