What the 2025 ‘State of Theology’ Survey Reveals About American Religious Belief
By Joe Carter, TGC.
For the past 30 years, I’ve pushed back against the critics who’ve said Christians need to abandon the label “evangelical.” I’ve argued that we shouldn’t let political associations or cultural baggage rob us of a word with such rich theological heritage. The term has deep biblical and historical roots that predate and transcend contemporary controversies.
But even I have to admit the label I love has become nearly meaningless in our current American context. What once signified adherence to core biblical truths—the authority of Scripture, the necessity of personal conversion, the centrality of Christ’s atoning work—now functions more as a political identifier than a theological one. As historian Thomas Kidd once said, “In American pop culture parlance, ‘evangelical’ now basically means whites who consider themselves religious and who vote Republican.”
Perhaps it’s time we concede it is indeed a political label since, as the 2025 State of Theology survey reveals, it doesn’t seem to signify much that’s distinctively orthodox Christian. As the survey shows, self-proclaimed evangelicals in the United States hold beliefs that would have rightly been considered heretical by previous generations of Bible-believing Christians.
Doctrinal Disaster
The State of Theology survey, a project produced by Ligonier Ministries and Lifeway Research, finds unorthodox views are common among evangelicals. Consider these doctrinal disasters.
On Human Nature
Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of evangelicals believe “Everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God,” while 53 percent affirm that “Everyone sins a little, but most people are good by nature.” This isn’t merely getting a theological nuance wrong; this is a fundamental rejection of the doctrine of original sin that undergirds the entire gospel message. If humans are basically good and born innocent, why did Christ need to die? Rather than being the center of God’s redemptive plan, the cross would be an unnecessary stumbling block (1 Cor. 1:23).