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Keep listening to learn about the new exegetical preaching blog. Welcome to Mortification of Spin, a casual conversation about things that count with Carl Truman, Todd

Pruitt, and Amy Bird. Mortification of Spin is a weekly podcast from the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

Let's join this week's conversation.

Well, you are listening to the mortification of Spin.

I am Todd Pruitt, and I'm joined as always by Amy Bird and Carl Truman.

And we're so glad that you joined us today.

Of course, we are three people who keep our fingers on the pulse of American Christianity.

And so we were a little interested at just the latest depressing study released from the Barna Research Group.

Now, you can have quibbles with the Barna research at various times. Their definition of

what a Christian is is quite broad, shall we say? But this survey was interesting because it seems

to have as a starting point a relatively decent definition of a quote,

a Bible-believing Christian, someone who affirms, you know, the Trinity, just as a baseline of a very basic,

the Bible's God's word, the Trinity, Jesus died for sinners, et cetera.

And what they have found in their research is that a slim 51% majority of Americans believe in the most basic biblical attributes of God, down from 73%, they say, three decades ago.

So we are increasingly, it seems, as the columnist Ross Duthat has written in a recent book,

we are increasingly a nation of heretics.

And of course, the Church of Jesus Christ as the ground and pillar of the truth.

We have a rather large responsibility in this.

Let me just throw out a couple of things from this study. So, for instance,

Americans are more confident, this was interesting, Americans are more confident about the

existence of 6% contending that Satan is an influential spiritual being, yet almost half,

...