Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

According to a recent report from statistician Ryan Burge, the belief in miracles has risen in recent years

among the college educated. That's the group that's been most correlated with materialistic beliefs. In 1991, just

45% of Americans with a bachelor's degree said that they, quote, definitely believe in miracles.

But according to the U.S. government's general social survey, that number had climbed to 63% by

2018.

And the change was even more dramatic among those with graduate level degrees.

In 1991, just 30% of those with at least a master's degree believed in miracles.

By 2018, that number jumped to 61%.

Apparently, education is just not the desupernaturalizing influence that it once was.

In fact, those with higher education are now as likely to believe in miracles as those without

higher education.

However, these surprising numbers are part of a larger story about Western secular society.

You see, the standard prediction about the West was that the growth and the expansion of technology and other things would continue to make us more secular,

and that more secular means less belief in God and less belief in the supernatural.

However, the percentage of atheists and agnostics in America has hardly budged,

even among the group that Burge refers to as the quote-unquote non-religious.

Even the so-called great de-churching that we've been hearing about

has not been a mass conversion to atheism.

But rather, it's an explosion of what sociologists

call the nuns, N-O-N-E's, people with no religion in particular. Now, making sense of this

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