Poll: U.S. Is a Land of Prayer, Belief in Heaven, Angels, and the Supremacy of a Higher Power

Americans are a people of faith, with strongly held beliefs in heaven, angels, the power of prayer, and the supremacy of a higher guiding force, a poll released Saturday by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows.

Pollsters found some 69 percent of people across the nation think angels are real, while the same number also believe in heaven and 72 percent believe in the power of prayer.

The Almighty is still all-powerful, with 79 percent of Americans believing in God or a higher power alongside 63 percent thinking karma is real, the polling shows.

Eighty-six percent of adults who believe that there are things that science or nature cannot explain also believe in God or a higher power, while 14 percent do not.

Among those who do not believe there are things that science or nature cannot explain, 44 percent believe in God or a higher power.

The widespread acceptance of angels shown in the AP-NORC poll makes sense to Susan Garrett, an angel expert and New Testament professor at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Kentucky.

It tracks with historical surveys, she said, telling AP the U.S. remains a faith-filled country even as more Americans reject organized religion, as Breitbart News previously reported.

But if the devil is in the details, so are people’s understandings of angels.

“They’re very malleable,” Garrett said of angels. “You can have any one of a number of quite different worldviews in terms of your understanding of how the cosmos is arranged, whether there’s spirit beings, whether there’s life after death, whether there’s a God … and still find a place for angels in that worldview.”

Talk of angels, Garrett said, is often also about something else, like the ways God interacts with the world and other hard-to-articulate ideas.

The large number of U.S. adults who say they believe in angels includes 84 percent of those with a religious affiliation — 94 percent of evangelical Protestants, 81 percent of mainline Protestants and 82 percent of Catholics — and 33 percent of those without one.

And of those angel-believing religiously unaffiliated, that includes two percent of atheists, 25 percent of agnostics and 50 percent of those identified as “nothing in particular.”

The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey polled 1,680 adults from May 11 to May 15, with a sampling error of 3.4 percent.

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