The ice is melting

And all that will remain will be a handful of angry fundamentalists

A new Gallup poll (and thank you, Stan, for sharing it) says that belief in the Bible as God’s literal word (a foundational belief for Christian fundamentalists, like me) is shrinking among Americans.

Just 20% of people in the U.S. now say they believe the Holy Bible is the literal word of God, down from 24% when the same question was asked in 2017.

Biblical literalism peaked in the early-to-mid-’80s, when the political group Moral Majority was busy trying to turn the country into a theocracy. But what does it mean to embrace the notion that the Bible was handed to us directly from God? From Britannica:

Literal interpretation asserts that a biblical text is to be interpreted according to the “plain meaning” conveyed by its grammatical construction and historical context. The literal meaning is held to correspond to the intention of the authors.

Think of Constitutional originalists, who also seek to interpret the text based on the authors’ original meaning. It doesn’t take long to realize that this is as impossible with constitutional law as it is with an ancient religious text, and the best a community that engage in such attempts can hope for is hurt feelings and nothing more. To paraphrase Rom. 6:23, the wages of originalism is death.

Personal postscript: At this point in my life, I heartily apologize for and reject my early attempts to convert people to this dust-blown way of life. To all those people whose door I knocked in Joplin, Mo., I’m sorry. You’re fine. The way of God is love, and everything else is dogma. God loves you, and so do I.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the scale, the Gallup poll says a new high of 29% of Americans see the Bible strictly as a collection of “fables, legends, history and moral precepts” collected by people, not inspired by deity. These shifts are occurring while the role of religion as an influencer appears to be waning in American life.

That last sentence may seem counter-intuitive, given the Supreme Court’s recent overturning of Roe v. Wade at the behest of rightwing conservative Christians. What conservative Christians may not understand is that in their hellbent-push toward theocracy, they are emptying their own pews. (Sadly? That may be the point, for as we know, many are called, and few are chosen — Matt. 22:14. These theocrats are fulfilling their own prophecy.)