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Originally Posted by DMcFadden  If you consider the Barna poll statistics over a very long time, you see that the cluelessness is not merely a artifact of poor survey phraseology ( Welcome to The Barna Group!).
While I consider Barna's views dangeous insofar as they have been taken as "Gospel" by too many evangelical pastors (now even leading to foolish notions of dispensing with "church" all together in favor of spiritual life coaching!!!), his skill at running scientifically valid and reliable surveys is pretty well established. |
Funny that you mentioned Barna because I was already looking at their website to get some comparative data.
A big difference between the Pew Forum and Barna is how they define "evangelical". The Pew Forum categorized people as evangelical based on what church denomination they "identify with most closely". This means that 28% of the people identified as "evangelical" only attend church a few times a year or even less. And it means that the Pew considered 26% of the US population to be evangelical.
The Barna Group on the other hand only considers 8% of the US population to be evangelical because they catagorize people based not on evangelical church affiliation but on an affirmation of 9 basic Christian statements, such as "the Bible is accurate in all it teaches" and "eternal salvation is only possible through grace and not works".