Around The Horn – 12.24.09

What Part of the Body are You?
Francis Chan’s amusing take on difficult Christians.

What People Do and Do Not Believe In
A new Harris Poll finds that the great majority (82%) of American adults believe in God, exactly the same number as in two earlier Harris Polls in 2005 and 2007. Large majorities also believe in miracles (76%), heaven (75%), that Jesus is God or the Son of God (73%), in angels (72%), the survival of the soul after death (71%), and in the resurrection of Jesus (70%).

Barna Offers Year-in-Review Perspective
Based on his company’s interviews with thousands of people during the year, researcher George Barna synthesized the findings across numerous studies and summarized four themes that emerged from his research regarding religion in 2009.

How Religious Is Your State?
Which of the 50 states has the most religious population? Since there are many ways to define “religious,” there is no single answer to this question. But to give a sense of how the states stack up, the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life used polling data to rank them on four measures: the importance of religion in people’s lives, frequency of attendance at worship services, frequency of prayer and absolute certainty of belief in God.

The Future of Evangelicals: A Conversation with Pastor Rick Warren
The evangelical Christian movement historically has been defined by its members’ distinctive doctrinal standards and practices. Yet in recent years many Americans have come to understand evangelicals more by their political, rather than religious, identity. The Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life invited Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., to discuss how this political association has affected the evangelical movement, what evangelicals’ most important concerns are today, and how the movement is evolving.

Change Nobody Believes In
From the WSJ – A bill so reckless that it has to be rammed though on a partisan vote on Christmas Eve.

Would Darwin Give A Monkey’s About Global Warming?
So yes, global warming is a threat to our survival. But then we are a threat to the survival of other species, from the late Dodo to the soon-to-be late polio virus. It is only a form of speciesism which laments the demise of the former over the latter, or ourselves over either or both.  Would Darwin, or should Darwinists (which is most of our political and scientific establishment), give a monkey’s* about global warming? If they are right, then at worst, it would reset the evolutionary clock. But we have every reason to believe the planet would recover. And it might even get rid of the chief planetary trouble makers, namely ourselves.

GOP Seen As Friendlier to Religion Than Democrats
Pew Research Center – More Americans continue to view the Republican Party as friendly toward religion (48%) than rate the Democratic Party that way (29%).  Views of the Democrats’ friendliness toward religion have declined among nearly all major religious groups and the religiously unaffiliated who say the Democratic Party is friendly toward religion is down 11 percentage points since last year.

Can A Christian Deny The Virgin Birth?
An older, but seasonally relevant, article by Al Mohler: Can a true Christian deny the virgin birth? This question would perplex the vast majority of Christians throughout the centuries, but modern denials of biblical truth make the question tragically significant.