Aaron, Israel, and the story of the Golden Calf (Exodus 32) is not just a lesson you should have learned in Sunday School. It is a powerful reminder that the sin of syncretism – attempting to blend together different religious ideas – is not just an ancient problem but very much a modern problem.
We can call this, Do It Yourself (DIY) religion.
America still identifies as an overwhelmingly Christian nation. Seventy percent of Americans still call themselves Christian. However, you would not know it from what Americans sadly believe or don’t believe.
That is the unavoidable summary of the latest research from Dr. George Barna and the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University. In its 2026 American Worldview Inventory, the Center asked U.S. adults seven questions about humanity and seven about the supernatural. On the questions about humanity, a majority gave the biblical answer only once. The same thing was true for the seven questions about the supernatural.
Here is the conclusion that should shock us: nine out of ten American adults, Barna concludes, now hold syncretism rather than biblical Christianity as their functional worldview: a homemade faith assembled from whatever fragments feel right. The irony is that most would never identify as being syncretistic, but it is the reality.
Here are some of the sobering results:
Some might question whether Dr. Barna’s research is accurate. But the 2025 State of Theology survey from Ligonier Ministries and Lifeway Research, released last fall, unveiled very similar results.
It should be pointed out that both surveys measure belief against Scripture rather than just human opinion.
So how did a nation that still overwhelmingly claims Christ come to reject so much of what He taught? I suggest three paths to our wilderness wanderings.
1. Decades of Humanistic Teaching
Dr. Barna’s own research has long held that a person’s worldview is essentially set by age 13. This is not to say that people don’t change over time, often for the worse, but who is teaching the majority of children in America?
Humanists have long realized that government-controlled education could have far more influence over shaping children than churches and Sunday schools.
C. F. Potter, the author of Humanism: A New Religion (1930) said this about Sunday School and government education.
“…education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every American public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday Schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?” [1]
When 4 years of high school is equivalent to about 20 years spent in a church, should we be surprised by the fruit? [2] The fruit is visible in the data. Among adults under 40, fewer than one in five believes human life is sacred. Half of the youngest adults reject the biblical view of human nature outright. These are not people who studied the Christian faith and found it wanting. They are people who were formed, year after formative year, inside a humanistic frame and were never handed an alternative. You cannot give what you have not received.
2. The Decline of Mainline Protestantism — in Numbers and in Theology
The collapse of the mainline denominations is usually told with numbers – plunging membership results and empty churches. The theological collapse is even more troubling.
In Barna’s data, attenders of mainline Protestant churches lag well behind their evangelical, Pentecostal, and non-denominational counterparts on nearly every measure of biblical conviction.
Where roughly four in five attenders of evangelical and non-denominational churches embrace the biblical view of humankind, the mainline figure falls to around two-thirds. The State of Theology adds another important point related to church attendance: mainline Protestants are among the most likely to say that private worship is an adequate substitute for gathering with the church at all.
J. Gresham Machen warned about theological liberalism a century ago. The fruit of abandoning the authority of Scripture continues to bring a deadly fruit.
We might be tempted to just dismiss these churches as we drive by them wincing at their pride flags on full display. But this is part of America’s loss. These denominations though failing are still significant in their influence.
Their theological collapse is not to be celebrated but mourned.
3. The Sharp Decline in Catholic Theology and Practice
If the mainline story is familiar, the Catholic one may surprise readers — and Barna’s findings here are among the most striking in the entire report.
The Common Thread — and The Way Forward
In Matthew 28:19-20 Jesus commanded His disciples in terms of their mission:
“Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
Amen.
The Barna and Lifeway-Ligonier surveys reveal that rather than Christians discipling the nations, our perverted culture has been discipling professed Christians even faster. As Barna put it, an objective spiritual profile of the country today portrays Americans as “narcissistic, unappreciative of the gift of life,” and consistently unbiblical in their convictions.
The Lord Jesus Christ also promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against His true church. Despite the darkness we can see God working in the lives of His people. A growing number of families are no longer depending on the institutions that failed them. Homeschooling now reaches an estimated 3.4 million American children and is growing at nearly triple its pre-pandemic rate, with the large majority of those families choosing it, at least in part, to provide the moral and religious formation the public schools will not.
My father believed that God might well use homeschooling to help bring revival. Much good fruit has come, but the path to true reformation is often difficult, and revival does not come through man but through God. There are still approximately 49.5 million children in government schools. We have a long path before us but let us press on. We should also give thanks that there is a growing Christian school movement.
We should be praying for God’s richest blessings on all the different forms of truly Christian education. And yes, let us also be thankful for ministries who also are seeking to reach those in government schools with the truth. I am certainly not saying that all who are in government schools are lost or all who are being trained at home or in Christian schools are saved by their environment.
Dr. Barna’s research is a mirror, not a verdict. It tells us what a century of borrowed beliefs has produced. It does not tell us what the next generation must believe. That is still being decided in churches and around family tables. Are you discipling your children and seeking also to see your grandchildren walk in truth? How could you encourage your family or your local church to be part of the mission given to us by our Lord and Savior?
Sources:
[1] Charles Francis Potter was an American Unitarian minister, theologian, and a leading early 20th-century advocate for humanism. Three years after publishing this book, he became one of the original signers of the first Humanist Manifesto in 1933.
[2] This calculation is only if a child is attending several hours of church services each week.
