How Certain Are Clergy Of Their Faith?
(ANALYSIS) I was thinking about the act of preaching the other day. It’s something that I did basically every weekend of my life from the time I was 23 until last July.
It’s such an odd thing to do in 2025, because how often does the average person just sit and listen to someone else talk for an extended period of time? Speeches used to be commonplace, and now they are a relative rarity.
Outside of a comedy show or a classroom lecture, it’s just not part of our everyday lives now.
But for a pastor, priest, rabbi or imam, it serves an incredibly important role in the weekly rhythm of their faith community. It’s a time to inspire the congregation to deepen its relationship with God or to understand a sacred text.
I’ve found that a number of religious leaders will use this time to project a type of faith that they hope their members will begin to follow. They speak authoritatively and with certainty in an effort to make their flock feel the same way.
For what it’s worth, that kind of rhetoric can absolutely inspire some listeners to deepen their relationship with the divine, but I sometimes wonder if it could turn other people away from religion entirely.
A common assumption is that religious leaders get in the pulpit and speak from a deep well of conviction and surety about where they stand on matters of religious belief. If anyone has few if any doubts, it has to be the person leading the congregation, right?
Maybe not — at least according to data from the National Survey of Religious Leaders, which is hosted on the Association of Religion Data Archives. The team that put that instrument together included a series of questions that probed how clergy thought about God, the Bible and various aspects of religious beliefs that offer a fascinating peek behind the curtain into the personal faith of religious leadership in the United States.
For instance, what about the most basic question: How strongly do clergy believe in the existence of God? Each person was given six possible response options, ranging from “I know God really exists, and I have no doubts about it” to “I don’t believe in God.”
For the record, just three Christian respondents in total took an atheist or agnostic position on this question.
However, that’s not to say that there wasn’t a bit of variation when this question is analyzed across religious traditions. For instance, 98% of Black Protestants and 89% of evangelicals expressed a certain belief in God.
That was followed closely by Catholics at 85%. The real outlier here were mainline Protestants — just 70% of them expressed a sure belief. Meanwhile, 26% of them said, “While I have doubts, I do believe in God.” That was easily the highest rate of any of the Christian clergy.
The non-Christian sample was really interesting to me, though. About a third of them expressed a sure belief. But another sizable chunk (29%) chose, “I don't believe in a personal God, but I do believe in a higher power of some kind.”
But then about 20% took an atheist or agnostic position on this question of God’s existence.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s post, visit his Substack page.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.