The American Bible Society's latest State of the Bible report finds that most Americans still believe in God and the supernatural, with 68 percent affirming belief in God, a slim majority accepting the resurrection of Jesus as historical fact, and sizable minorities reporting personal brushes with miracles, answered prayer and even spiritual attack.
What's actually new
The numbers themselves are the news here, and they are worth laying out plainly. According to the report, 68 percent of Americans believe in God, 20 percent are unsure, and 13 percent do not believe. Belief in heaven sits at 62 percent, angels at 64 percent, and the darker side of the ledger isn't far behind: 55 percent believe in satan, 53 percent in hell, and 51 percent in demons.
On specific biblical events, 53 percent say the resurrection of Jesus "definitely" or "probably" happened, 49 percent affirm the virgin birth, and 44 percent believe the parting of the Red Sea occurred as described. These aren't abstract theological positions. They're claims about things actually happening, and the survey treats them as such.
Then there's the experiential data, which is arguably the more interesting layer. Forty-eight percent say they've prayed for something and seen it answered in a way they'd call miraculous. Thirty-five percent say they've witnessed or experienced divine healing. Twenty-six percent report experiencing what they describe as spiritual attack. The report is careful to note that these figures come from the entire surveyed population, not a self-selected subset of churchgoers, and that respondents were left to define terms like "miraculous" and "spiritual attack" for themselves.
Dr. John Farquhar Plake, the American Bible Society's Chief Innovation Officer and the report's editor-in-chief, frames this as evidence that most Americans still sense life is more than material, and that the Bible is a tool for connecting the natural and supernatural for people seeking answers.
The article also places these numbers alongside other recent polling for context. A 2025 Pew Research Center survey found 83 percent of Americans believe in "God or a universal spirit," a broader question that naturally pulls a higher number. And a comparison point from abroad: a Pew survey from last year found only 53 percent of French adults believe in God, which the article uses to argue that American religiosity remains unusually high compared to other Western nations.
I've sat through enough of these annual belief surveys to know that the headline numbers rarely move much year to year, and the real story is almost always in the fine print. That's true here too. The survey doesn't claim America is experiencing a religious revival. It claims the predicted secular collapse hasn't materialized as sharply as some assume. Those are different statements, and the report is careful enough to stick to the second one.
What we don't know yet
The article doesn't tell us the sample size of the State of the Bible survey, how it was fielded, or its margin of error. For a report built entirely on percentages, that's a real gap. We also don't get a timeframe for when the survey was conducted, which matters for a study being positioned as capturing where America stands "now."
There's no year-over-year comparison in the piece. Is 68 percent belief in God higher or lower than last year's State of the Bible report, or five years ago? Without that trend line, it's hard to say whether this data actually "challenges" a secularization narrative, as the article claims, or simply confirms a plateau that's been stable for a while. The framing asserts a challenge to conventional wisdom without showing the comparison that would prove it.
The demographic breakdown is also missing. Belief in God, the resurrection, and miracles presumably varies by age, region, religious affiliation, and political identity, and those splits would tell us a lot more about where American belief is heading than a single national topline. None of that appears here.
The self-reported experiential numbers, the answered prayers, the divine healings, the spiritual attacks, come with an built-in asterisk that the report itself acknowledges: respondents defined these terms themselves. That's an honest disclosure, but it also means these figures measure something closer to "how many Americans interpret their experiences through a supernatural lens" rather than any verifiable event. The article doesn't pretend otherwise, which is to its credit, but it's worth restating plainly since the headline doesn't carry that nuance.
Finally, we don't know how the American Bible Society's question wording compares to Pew's. The article notes the gap between 68 percent and 83 percent belief depending on whether the question asks about "God" specifically or "God or a universal spirit," but it doesn't explain the American Bible Society's exact phrasing, which matters when stacking surveys against each other.
Who should care
If you track American religious life, whether as a pastor, a sociologist, a journalist, or just someone curious about where the culture actually stands versus where cable news says it stands, this is a useful data point to file away. It's a reasonably clean counterweight to the assumption that belief in God and the Bible is in freefall, and the comparison to French belief numbers is a genuinely interesting bit of context for anyone who assumes American secularization mirrors Europe's.
If you're looking for proof of a religious resurgence, pump the brakes. Nothing here shows belief increasing. It shows belief persisting at levels that are still high by Western standards, which is a different and more modest claim. I've covered enough of these reports to know the temptation is always to read the bigger story into the numbers than the numbers actually support, and this one, fairly read, supports "still here" more than "coming back."
Casual readers who already have a settled view on American religiosity, one way or the other, won't find much here to shift that view. The percentages are consistent with what most people already assume about the country: more religious than it looks on social media, less religious than it was decades ago, and still a long way from the empty pews some commentators like to predict. If that sentence doesn't surprise you, the full report probably won't either.
