A new study by Christian pollster George Barna comparing Americans’ religious beliefs and practices before and after the COVID pandemic finds some stunning departures from biblically faithful Christianity — including a 14 point drop, from 58%-44%, in the percentage of “born-again” Christians who believe Jesus lived a sinless life on Earth.
The survey, released April 20 and conducted by the Cultural Research Center (CRC), based at Arizona Christian University, in Glendale, Arizona, finds a mere 4% of overall Americans polled who possess a “biblical worldview,” down from 6%, while among born-again Christians, “the incidence of biblical worldview among them fell from 19% in 2020 to 13% in 2023.”
In another finding the report, which compares religious beliefs and practices in 2020, before the pandemic, to 2023, found a huge drop among born-again Christians — from 85% to just 50% — who say they are “deeply committed to practicing [their] faith.”
It’s not all bad news, though: the poll found a 14% uptick (from 32%-46%) in the percentage of people polled who agree that, “There are moral absolutes that apply to everyone, all the time.”
More Americans in 2023 (46%, up from 41% in 2020) believe the Bible is the “true and completely accurate word of God,” according to the poll. And born-again Christians registered a leap from 47% to 59% who accept the biblical teaching that sex “between two people who are not married to each other is morally unacceptable.”
The CRC study, “How the Faith of Americans Has Shifted Since the Start of the Pandemic,” released April 20, compares 2,000 U.S. adults in 2000 to the same number in 2023. Of those totals, 671 were considered born-again Christians in the 2020 survey and 650 were considered born-again in the 2023 survey. It is part of CRC’s ongoing to attempt to quantify Americans’ adherence to a biblical worldview since the COVID pandemic began.
The poll’s cross-tabs measure and compare two sets of Americans: a general group of randomly selected respondents, and “born again” Christians who voiced belief in the biblical gospel (“good news”) that they cannot count on their own goodness to get to heaven but rather the saving grace of God through the sacrifice of His Son, Jesus Christ, who died to pay the price for their sins.
Here are some other notable findings in the report:
- A 12 percentage drop, from 60% to 14%, in Americans generally who agree with the statement: “You are deeply committed to practicing your religious faith”;
- A 14% drop, from 58-44%, in born-again Christians who believe the “Bible is unambiguous in its teaching about abortion”;
- A whopping 42% drop, from 88%-46% among born-again Christians who agree with the statement: “You have a unique, God-given calling or purpose for your life”;
- A 12-point drop in overall Americans’ religious beliefs, from 39%-29% who believe that “Human life is sacred.”
In a phone interview with WND, Barna ascribed the contradictory results of his survey to Americans’ predominant worldview of “syncretism,” which his report describes as “combining beliefs from a variety of worldviews into an unpredictable, customized blend that satisfies the emotional needs of the individual.”
“The results are confusing and contradictory because people are confused, and that includes many Christians,” Barna told WND. “The leading worldview is syncretism, and syncretism is essentially a confused belief system.”
He said the shocking, 35-point drop in born-again Christians who say they are “deeply committed” to practicing their faith is a reality-check brought on by the COVID pandemic and the government’s extreme, devastating lockdowns.
“Many self-professed Christians are not deeply committed, although they always seem to think they are,” Barna said. “Then the pandemic and the government’s extreme reaction to it came along and many who were hit hard by it said to themselves, ‘My faith really didn’t hold up for me.’”
Barna said American evangelical churches, especially “megachurches,” are “really good at marketing, but they’re not very good at discipling believers, and building up in their members a depth of commitment to Jesus.”
He said this unique, post-COVID era presents an amazing opportunity for faithful Christians to befriend, witness to, and disciple people in crisis, be they spiritually wandering family members, friends, or co-workers. He said many people are asking big questions about life and God in the wake of the pandemic, and the “remnant” of deeply committed followers of Jesus need to share the love and hope of Christ with them.
But beyond that, he said, Christians need to disciple new believers, or old believers, to help ground them in their faith.
“People will not become more committed as believers unless someone gets close to them and disciples them,” he said, adding that there is a “dearth of discipleship” in the larger church.
Biblical worldview?
Regarding the stunning drop of born-again Christians (58% in 2020 to 44% in 2023) who say they do not agree with the fundamental Christian and biblical belief that “Jesus did not commit sins during His time on Earth,” Barna told WND: “Most born-again Christians do not have a biblical worldview,” something he has been saying a very long time.
The CRC report states, “All told, there were 13 statistically significant changes identified among the born-again population — and the magnitude of the shift for two of them is quite astonishing.” The first is the 35-point drop described above among those who say they are “deeply committed” to their faith. The second is a 42-point drop, from 88%-46%, in respondents saying they have a “unique God-given calling or purpose for their life.”
In a previous report released in March, Barna laid out seven “cornerstones” of a biblical worldview:
- An orthodox, biblical understanding of God;
- All human beings are sinful by nature; every choice we make has moral considerations and consequences;
- The consequences of our sin can only be forgiven and eliminated through Jesus Christ. That forgiveness is available only by our personal, sincere acknowledgment and confession of our sins and complete reliance on His grace for the forgiveness of those sins’
- The entire Bible is true, reliable and relevant, making it the best moral guide for every person in all situations;
- Absolute moral truth exists — and those truths are defined by God, describes in the Bible, and are unchanging across time and cultures;
- The ultimate purpose of human life is to know, love, and serve God with all your heart, mind, strength and soul;
- Success on Earth is best understood as consistent obedience to God — in thoughts, words and actions.
“When you put the data in perspective, the biblical worldview is shuffling toward the edge of the cliff,” Barna said in the CRC’s first release of its “Worldview Inventory 2023,” released in February. “As things stand today, biblical theism is much closer to extinction in America than it is to influencing the soul of the nation. The current incidence of adults with the biblical worldview is the lowest since I began measuring it in the early 1990s.”
The veteran evangelical researcher cautioned, “Young people, in particular, are largely isolated from biblical thought in our society and are the most aggressive at rejecting biblical principles in our culture.”
The newest report describes “indefensible shifts in born-again beliefs,” and said “six beliefs of born-again Christians endured significant decline in the past three years.”
Barna told WND the vast majority of Americans, including so many self-identified Christians, lack a biblical worldview because they do not prioritize the study of Scripture, and because they take their cues from “the most powerful influence” in the culture: “arts and entertainment.”
Under the heading, “Declines in Biblical Behavior,” the CRC report states “there was a dramatic drop among born-again adults in being deeply committed to practicing their religious faith. Another decline is in studying or reading the Bible during a typical week, which declined 5 points, from 60% in 2020 to 55% in 2023.”
Barna told WND he hopes America’s spiritual crisis has “bottomed out,” but whether it has or not, the most pressing question for faithful Christians is this: “Will the five percent of ‘remnant’ believers … who are sold out to Him recognize this moment of opportunity” to share their faith and disciple new followers of the Savior?
Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
