do i believe in god essay

By BGEA Admin   •   July 13, 2021   •   Topics: Faith , God

There is a lot said about people of faith, yet I have many friends who say they have faith but they cannot identify “faith in what or in whom.” Some say it is just believing that there is a greater power than mankind. What is the truth?

From the writings of the Rev. Billy Graham

Having faith in God the Creator of the world is not simply education or experience. The Bible begins with the simple words: “In the beginning God … ”  These four words are the cornerstone of all existence and of all human history. God is not just “a power.” He is the source of all things. He is the beginning and the end.

Without God, there could have been no beginning and no continuing. God indeed was the creating power. By divine fiat, He brought form out of shapelessness, order out of disorder, and light out of darkness.

God cannot be rationalized—to try is to fail. There are mysteries about God that we will never understand in this life. We should not think it strange that it is impossible to comprehend God intellectually, when it is equally impossible to explain many mysteries in the realm of matter. Who can fathom the law of gravity? Newton discovered it, but he could not explain it.

There are many arguments we could marshal to give evidence of the existence of God. We see objects that have no intellect, such as stars and planets, moving in a consistent pattern, cooperating with one another. Hence, it is evident that they achieve their movements not by accident, but by design. If God can be fully proved by the human mind, then He is no greater than the mind that proves Him. Cry out to God, “Lord … help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24). There is only one God, and He wants everyone to come to Him and be saved.

(This column is based on the words and writings of the late Rev. Billy Graham.)

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Why Do We Believe in God?

Matthew nelson, march 10, 2020.

Home › Articles › Why Do We Believe in God?

Do we come to belief in God through personal encounter, or arguments, or both? When we ask ourselves ‘Why do we believe in God?’ our faith provides the first response,” offered St. John Paul II during a 1985 General Audience . “We believe in God because God has made himself known to us as the supreme Being, the great ‘Existent.’”

We believe in the unseen Trinity first and foremost because we have been convicted by grace through faith. “Faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ,” affirms St. Paul (Rom. 10:17). Faith comes by the authority and testimony of another; and as recipients of God’s Word—which may come to us orally, in writing, or indeed through a direct encounter with the incarnate Logos, Jesus Christ—we can come to know truths that transcend the humble faculties of reason alone. We believe principally because we trust in what—or who —we have heard and encountered.

But if faith comes to us principally through the authority of another, does reason have a part to play in the acquisition of faith? According to St. Paul the answer is yes. For him it is not only God but that which God has created that can be revelatory. For as the Apostle says in his Letter to the Romans, the physical world can testify and reveal God’s “eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are” (Rom. 1:20).

St. Paul placed great value on the revelatory capabilities of the senses. He believed that through philosophical contemplation that followed upon sense experience, we could come to know the existence of the divine Creator (Rom. 1:20). For St. Paul the senses could indeed reveal to us the real; indeed, by way of the proximately real the senses had the capability of leading us to the really real—the one God who simply and infinitely is .

But St. Paul knew that God might also reveal himself directly, through a person-to-person encounter, by the power of the Holy Spirit: “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom. 8:15).

Sensing God

We might be moved to believe in God because we have directly experienced him, independently of rational argument. But now here’s a question pertaining the reasonableness of belief based on experience: Would such a religious experience alone , in the absence of other evidence, be adequate to justify religious belief?

From Sigmund Freud to Richard Dawkins, skeptics have often expressed intense discontent towards the justification of faith based on religious experience. This is understandable. We can be tempted to believe many false things if we base our conclusions on feelings alone. But in recent times, Christian philosophers like the (rightly) esteemed Alvin Plantinga—inspired by Calvin’s notion of the sensus divinitatis or “sense of the divine”—have argued that belief in God may be treated as a “properly basic” belief—that is, a fundamental belief that requires no further justification to be rationally held.

On this view, then, belief in God based solely on religious experience may be fully justified if the belief is, 1) true, and 2) undefeated by objections. In such a case then one could be fully justified in believing in God even if they do not have “positive” arguments supporting their belief. Their interior experience of God would be enough.  

Arguments and Belief

But now let’s return to our initial question: Why do we believe in God?

We have already noted that God may reveal himself to us directly through the power of the Holy Spirit. But unless God reveals himself in this way, which is entirely by grace, God’s existence is not immediately evident to us. As St. Thomas tells us, God is self-evident in himself but not self-evident to us. Thus, even the unbaptized know God—but in a “general and confused way.”

And this is where human reason comes in. Indeed, rational arguments have much to add to brute religious experience. First of all, arguments serve to clear the mental debris that prevents us from seeing God more clearly. Second of all, they serve to authenticate our religious experiences and perhaps reveal more to us about the divine person—or persons—we have encountered experientially. Thus, just as religious experience may authenticate in a deeper way what we already know by demonstration, so also may philosophical demonstration authenticate religious experience.

Even if Plantinga is correct that arguments are not necessary to warrant belief in God, it would not follow that arguments have no important part to play in the life of faith. For if belief in God can be warranted by authentic religious experience and we can prove with positive arguments that theism is true, then as William Lane Craig has pointed out, we are doubly warranted to believe in God: first by grace through faith—but also by reason.

In Humani Generis (1950), Pope Pius XII echoed St. Paul’s affirmation of the possibility of natural theology when he wrote, “Human reason by its own natural force and light can arrive at a true and certain knowledge of the one personal God, Who by His providence watches over and governs the world.”

There are many paths by which we may come to philosophical knowledge of God. Such knowledge always begins in wonder —and then diverges. “Instinctively, when we witness certain happenings, we ask ourselves what caused them,” wrote St. John Paul II. “How can we not but ask the same question in regard to the sum total of beings and phenomena which we discover in the world?”

That the world exists unnecessarily—that is to say, that there is something rather nothing—is a fact that has incessantly poked at the minds of the deepest of thinkers. “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is,” mused Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Tractatus . From St. Thomas Aquinas to G.W. Leibniz, great thinkers through the ages have concluded that that the world exists, despite not having to, points to a deeper metaphysical truth—a necessary being that explains all that is. Indeed, for St. Thomas it was not a necessary being but only (and necessarily) Being itself which could sufficiently explain the universe, who possessed all perfections—love, intelligence, creativity, and the like—without limit.

Many Ways to God

The ways to God by reason are many, and rarely work on the mind in isolation from the others. As St. John Henry Newman reminded us in his  Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent , all of our reasons for belief converge upon one single subject from a variety of angles in a symphony of “converging evidences.” Echoing this insight, St. John Paul II observed :

A myriad of indications impels man, who tries to understand the universe in which he lives, to direct his gaze toward his Creator. The proofs for the existence of God are many and convergent. They contribute to show that faith does not humble human intelligence, but stimulates it to reflection and permits it to understand better all the “whys” posed by the observation of reality.

Indeed, the order, intelligibility, and “finality” (or goal-directedness) of nature also compel the mind, intuitively and discursively, to ponder the Supreme Intellect behind it all. Pope John Paul acknowledged the evidential power of such features of the natural world:

The evolution of living beings, of which science seeks to determine the stages and to discern the mechanism, presents an internal finality which arouses admiration. This finality which directs beings in a direction for which they are not responsible or in charge, obliges one to suppose a Mind which is its inventor, its creator.

Of course—as John Paul carefully notes in the passage above—it is the physical sciences that are best appropriated to investigate the phenomena of nature. But science does not precede nor supersede philosophical contemplation. Rather, science presupposes the philosophical, and at the same time integrates it into its method necessarily when it moves into the process of analysis.

For many, a study of metaphysics—that is, what is beyond ( meta ) the physical—has fallen out of style and into the shadow of the physical sciences. As particle physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne has observed , “Metaphysics is not a word that many scientists feel happy with. It is not uncommon for the concept to be dismissed.” But, he counters, this dismissal is in vain. “In actual fact,” says Polkinghorne, “it is impossible to think seriously without taking a metaphysical stance, since this simply means adopting a world-view. We think metaphysics as naturally and inevitably as we speak prose ” (emphasis added).

Indeed, we do. Granted, our metaphysical thinking is not always concretely discursive; that is to say, we are not always aware of our assumptions, premises, and ways of getting to our conclusions, nor are we always thinking in—or even able to think in—the technical jargon of philosophy. That being said, by the virtue of the fact that we are rational , we are ever in the state of mentally peeling back the layers of reality, always drawing conclusions and making distinctions about what is and what ought to be. That being said, we are not often explicitly cognizant of our mental activities as metaphysical. “All men have a reason,” wrote St. John Henry Newman,” but not every man can give a reason.”

When it comes to the existence of God, then, we cannot help but seek understanding to supplement and fortify our faith. God has created us for himself; and as art reveals something of the artist, so also does the world he has placed us in reveal the nature and divinity of God. Every person by nature desires to know, wrote Aristotle famously. And we might also add that every person—at least in a general and confused way—desires to know God. Our rational nature permits us as human persons to intuit God experientially, but also all-at-once instills within us an irremediable appetite to know God intellectually. Thus, both experience and argument play pivotal roles for belief in God.

Believing in God

Why do we believe in God? We believe in God, first, by faith. Trusting in the authority of the Church, strengthened by the wisdom and witness of the Sacred Scriptures, inspired by the testimony of the saints, and moved interiorly by the Holy Spirit, we believe by grace that God has revealed himself to us.

But we believe also because our minds tell us that God is real and Christianity is true. We believe what we know, we know what we believe, and the coming together of faith and knowledge happens not by force but by a harmonious integration. As grace perfects nature, so faith perfects reason. Or in the words of Pope Benedict XVI: “Faith presupposes reason and perfects it, and reason, enlightened by faith, finds the strength to rise to knowledge of God and spiritual realities.”

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Blog / How to Live the Bible — Why Believing Makes Sense

How to Live the Bible — Why Believing Makes Sense

This is the one-hundred-twenty-fifth lesson in author and pastor Mel Lawrenz’ How to Live the Bible series . If you know someone or a group who would like to follow along on this journey through Scripture, they can get more info and sign up to receive these essays via email here .

“Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash” ( Matthew 7:24-27 ).

The gospel writers make it clear that one of the outstanding features of Jesus’ ministry was that he freely and naturally exercised this authority. People sensed that they were under the immediate influence of God. Jesus’ words struck at the heart; they were clear, strong, unequivocal, simple, and mysterious. They both wounded and healed, and when they did wound, they offered immediate healing as well. His words still stick in people’s minds and keep moving across the landscape of history like a cyclone. That’s why almost everybody, including even proponents of other religions, show respect for the thunder and lightning of Jesus’ teaching.

But showing respect is one thing; responding is another. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus talked about one man who built a house on a rock foundation and another whose house rested on a bed of unstable sand. The house-on-sand person hears Jesus’ words only, whereas the house-on-rock person hears and practices. Respect plus response. It was right after this tale of two builders that Matthew mentions the people’s astonishment at Jesus’ authority. The people were not saying, “Did you hear what this fellow is trying to assert?” They were swept up in the power of the Word himself. His authority carried them, and it carries us still. It summons us not just to listen, but to act.

House building is a metaphor for life. Christ does not assert authority so that he can push his weight around. God doesn’t impose commands so that he can have a bevy of mindless followers. His is an act of grace. These authoritative words come to us because God knows there’s so much we need to learn about life. Ignorance may not be a sin, but it’s an extraordinarily dangerous way to live.

When someone asks, “Why should I believe what Christianity teaches?” or “Why should I believe the specific things taught about personal ethics, and life after death, and God’s providence in history, and angels, and failure?” the answer he or she deserves is that followers of Jesus Christ believe such things (knowing and trusting) because they believe they have heard an authoritative voice on the matters. Christ summons, and the oracles of prophets and the writings of apostles are Holy Scripture—the exhalation of God’s own Spirit.

I participated once in a discussion with someone about psychic knowledge, and the person commented, “I could believe that.” I wondered, what does that mean, “I could believe that”? Thinking, “I could believe that,” is a short step from “I want to believe that,” which is one more short step from “I choose to believe that.” “But why believe something just because you think you could?” Isn’t the question, should I believe that?

That’s the reason why we need authority.

I could believe that once there was a land called Atlantis; the romanticism and mystery of it is titillating. I could believe it just because I want to believe it. I could believe that intelligent beings from other galaxies are living in my community right now. I could believe that cancer is caused by cold winters because someone wrote a book claiming it once. But what should I believe? Shouldn’t my beliefs line up with reality?

Frighteningly, many people today don’t care whether their beliefs line up with reality. If their beliefs have a pleasing or useful effect in life, then they go ahead and hold onto them. They don’t worry about whether they’re grounded in truth or not. It’s too much of a hassle to conform beliefs to the form of reality, and certainly inconvenient to risk conflict with someone else’s beliefs. Besides, these people ask, is there any such thing as truth, anyway?

But we all know, really, that we can’t live that way. We don’t live that way. When we receive a bank statement on our accounts, we assume the transactions line up with the reality of our actual deposits and withdrawals. In fact, we assume they line up precisely, that the balance is not a whimsical number a bank official decided to put on the statement. When someone is on trial for murder we assume the careful process of deliberation will produce a verdict that’s true. If a doctor tells you he believes a growth in your abdomen is completely benign and thus does not require surgery, you want to know that this is not an arbitrary opinion on his part because his schedule is too booked to fit in another surgery. You don’t want the doctor thinking, “I could believe it’s benign.”

But, some will argue, it’s different with religious beliefs because they’re not as objective as legal and medical and financial matters. We shouldn’t go looking for religious authority because no one should dare call anybody else wrong or have the audacity to say that you’ve found spiritual truth.

But if we’re honest, we’ve got to say there really is a Creator or there isn’t. And if there is a God and that God is perfection and goodness, then we believe because we must believe. It’s the only intelligent thing to do.

[To be continued – Says Who? Says God! ]

[See previous – Whom Should We Believe? ] ___________

___________

[If you believe this series will be helpful, this is the perfect time to forward this to a friend, a group, or a congregation, and tell them they too may sign up for the weekly emails here ]

Mel Lawrenz ( @MelLawrenz ) trains an international network of Christian leaders, ministry pioneers, and thought-leaders. He served as senior pastor of Elmbrook Church in Brookfield, Wisconsin, for ten years and now serves as Elmbrook’s teaching pastor. He has a PhD in the history of Christian thought and is on the adjunct faculty of Trinity International University. Mel’s many books include Spiritual Leadership Today: Having Deep Influence in Every Walk of Life (Zondervan, 2016). See more of Mel’s writing at WordWay .

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Why I Believe in God

Some of my favorite authors are agnostics, men and women who face life honestly and courageously without faith in a personal God.  They’re stoics mostly, persons who have made peace with the fact that God may not exist and that perhaps death ends everything for us. I see this, for example, in the late James Hillman, a man whom I greatly admire and who has much to teach believers about what it means to listen to and honor the human soul.

But here’s something I don’t admire in these agnostic stoics: While they face with courage what it should mean for us if God doesn’t exist and death ends our personal existence, they don’t, with the same courage ask the question of what it should mean for us if God does exist and death does not end our personal existence. What if God does exist and what if the tenets of our faith are true? They need too to face that question.

I believe that God exists, not because I have never had doubts, or because I was raised in the faith by persons whose lives gave deep witness to its truth, or because perennially the vast majority of people on this planet believe in God. I believe that a personal God exists for more reasons than I can name: the goodness of saints; the hook in my own heart that has never let me go; the interface of faith with my own experience, the courage of religious martyrs throughout history; the stunning depth of Jesus’ teachings; the deep insights contained in other religions, the mystical experience of countless people; our sense of connection inside the communion of saints with loved ones who have died; the convergence of the anecdotal testimony of hundreds of individuals who have been clinically dead and resuscitated back to life; the things we sometimes intuitively know beyond all logical reason; the constant recurrence of resurrection in our lives; the essential triumph of truth and goodness throughout history; the fact that hope never dies, the unyielding imperative we feel inside of ourselves to be reconciled with others before we die; the infinite depth of the human heart; and, yes, even the very ability of atheists and agnostics to intuit that somehow it still all makes sense, points to the existence of a living, personal God.

I believe that God exists because faith works; at least to the extent we work it. The existence of God proves itself true to the extent that we take it seriously and live our lives in face of it.  Simply put, we’re happy and at peace to the exact extent that we risk, explicitly or implicitly, living lives of faith. The happiest people I know are also the most generous, selfless, gracious, and reverent persons I know. That’s no accident.

Leon Bloy once asserted that there’s only one true sadness in life, that of not being a saint. We see that in the story of the rich young man in Gospels who turns down Jesus’ invitation to live his faith more deeply. He goes away sad. Of course, being a saint and being sad are never all or nothing, both have degrees. But there’s a constant: We’re happy or sad in direct proportion to our fidelity or infidelity to what’s one, true, good, and beautiful. I know that existentially: I’m happy and at peace to the exact extent that I take my faith seriously and live it out in fidelity; the more faithful I am, the more at peace I am, and vice versa.

Inherent in all of this too is a certain “law of karma”, namely, the universe gives back to us morally exactly what we give to it. As Jesus worded it,  the measure you measure out is the measure that will be measured back to you.  What we breathe out is what we’re going to inhale.  If I breathe out selfishness, selfishness is what I will inhale; if I breathe out bitterness, that’s what I’ll meet at every turn; conversely, if I breathe out love, gracious, and forgiveness, these will be given back to me in the exact measure that I give them out. Our lives and our universe have a deep, innate, non-negotiable structure of love and justice written into them, one that can only be underwritten by a living, personal, divine mind and heart of love.

None of this, of course, proves God’s existence with the kind of proof we find in science or mathematics; but God isn’t found at the end of an empirical test, a mathematical equation, or a philosophical syllogism. God is found, explicitly or implicitly, in living a good, honest, gracious, selfless, moral life, and this can happen inside of religion or outside of it.

The Belgium Benedictine, Benoit Standaert, submits that  wisdom is three things, and a fourth . Wisdom is a respect for knowledge; wisdom is a respect for honesty and aesthetics; and wisdom is a respect for mystery. But there’s a fourth – wisdom is a respect for Someone.

By Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI. This article originally appeared on  ronrolheiser.com .

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What My Faith in God Looks Like

By Dustin Junkert

• July 20, 2009

I grew up quietly and without thought. My mom was a secretary at the Baptist church, and I led the worship team senior year of high school. My youth pastor was one of my best friends. I believed in God and my parents, my friends, and the four walls of my house. All things were within reach, simple and inspiring. And I told my girlfriend I wanted to be a writer.

She told me I was very smart and of course I’d be a writer. I wrote a rhyming 12-line poem over the course of three days, a maze of abstraction. I read it over and over until I had it memorized. In high school English, I dazed off reciting my poem in my head, the poem that would soon be recited by everyone in 12th-grade English across the country, once I settled on a publisher. Soon after, I began work on my first novel, a period piece about a 17th-century Huguenot family fleeing the Inquisition.

Eager to continue my spiritual journey, I went to a private Christian college in Oregon complete with a lifestyle contract. Freshman year, I met Frank, a lifelong philosopher. He was a couple rooms down from me. He asked me all sorts of wild questions I had never thought about before, like, “Well, why do you believe that?” Everything I said that year, Frank would ask me that question. Then I started asking myself that question about every thought I had. It was a sort of game, which most of the time sounded like this:

Why shouldn’t I have sex before I marry?

Because the Bible says it’s a sin.

Because it keeps you from Him.

Why doesn’t all sex keep you from Him?

Because premarital sex does not require any commitment.

Why do you need commitment?

Because sex is special.

Why do you think that?

Because it says so in the Bible.

Why do you believe the Bible?

Because it’s God’s word.

How do you know that?

Because it says it in there.

Well, I am speaking the words of God right now, do you believe me?

Because. . . .

The game generally started with a question, cycled through my beliefs, and ended with “because. . . .” Soon it was ending in just “. . . .”

I took a class called “The Problem of Religious Diversity” that quickly had me believing that just about any belief system could be true and that no one could prove anything. It never occurred to me until then that people who believed something other than Christianity had the same reason for believing their faith as I did for believing mine.

How about that?

I ran into an old Sunday school teacher sophomore year and told him I’d been thinking that maybe it’s not true that everyone who’s not a Baptist will go to Hell. He looked me straight in the eye with saintly gravity and said: “The Bible is very clear: if you believe that, you aren’t a Christian. In fact, if we were in the 17th century right now, you’d be burned at the stake.” I, of course, knew this from all the research I’d done for my novel. But the way he said it put me in a state of fear at first, then repentance, then confusion, and lastly anger. I rebelled from the religion that contained all the smallness of my childhood. I cursed my Baptist teacher, God and the novel, and fled to Russia for a study-abroad semester sponsored by a coalition of Christian colleges.

The first person I talked to there was Dan, a student at Grace College in Michigan. He immediately asked the last question I wanted to hear: “So what’s your faith look like?” I went cold. I wanted to bleat my usual Jesus-story and be done with it, but the ice on my ribs wouldn’t let me lie. I reluctantly collapsed and told him that honestly, I didn’t know anything anymore and nothing was real. Turns out, Dan was in the same place I was.

Together we raved and doubted and yelled and trembled all semester long. We felt the black blood of Dostoevsky and descended the dark stairs of Derrida and Sartre. Some nights, we would just sit across from each other and stare, estranged by the cold of a new, uncertain world. After one of these nights of existential fog, as I got up to go, I turned to Dan and said, “The only meaningful thing left to do in this world, it seems, is to sit quietly with a friend until dark and then say goodnight.”

Then, on a snow-gray Russian day, riding a packed bus, a song came on my iPod that froze me in time. In a sense, I’m still there on that bus listening to that song with watering eyes. It was a song called “Clouds” by As Cities Burn that said: “Is your god really God? / Is my god really God? / I think our god isn’t God / If he fits inside our heads.”

With the terrifying pull of rubber bands, I expanded beyond the length of the bus, grew from the street to the sky. Then I snapped and everything came undone. I resigned entirely. God won’t fit inside our heads, and if He does, we’re missing something. And I knew all I’d been waiting for was to know that to admit doubt was not to lose faith. A few simple lines of an Indie rock song pushed me to see hope amid uncertainty.

It snowed continually my last two weeks in Russia. I met Dan one morning at a small cafe, Biblioteca, where we drank bottomless black tea and watched the snow pile up on the street. He said he had prayed the night before. I said I was ready to step back into a church.

Our last Sunday in Moscow, we attended Mass, an Orthodox church, then a mosque. Dan said we were a Protestant service away from a monotheistic grand slam. At Mass, I wrote in my journal, “God, see that I’m trying.”

It was the first time I had prayed in more than a year.

Dustin Junkert, George Fox University, class of 2009, writing/literature major

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Why I Believe the Bible

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As Christians, we are always to be ready to give a defense of the hope that is within us (1 Pet. 3:15). The basis of this hope is our confidence that the Bible is God’s Word. It is trustworthy and sufficient. I’ve put these five points together as something of a quick reference notecard for why I believe the Bible. They can serve as a quick reference for personal evangelism or devotion. That is, they can help you to tell others why you believe the Bible while also reminding you (amid seasons of doubt) why you believe it.

(1) The Biblical Argument

By this, I only mean that the Bible claims to be God’s Word. This claim is not just in a remote passage or book but throughout. We read in 2 Timothy 3:16, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” The source of the text, the Word, is God himself. There is no flinching on this fact from Genesis to Revelation. The fact that the Bible claims to be God’s Word and proves to be so throughout history needs to be on my mind when dealing my doubts or a skeptic’s.

(2) The Historical Argument

In short, the people and places in the Bible show up in history. When we read of descriptions of times and events we often find these same things in extra-biblical history. Further, when archeologists dig and uncover ancient artifacts it often shows us that biblical events that were not previously discovered were in fact true. And finally, the history of events from within the Bible concerning prophecy, they happen. Consider the Babylonian captivity, King Cyrus, and the details concerning the life of Christ. Within the canon of Scripture, it unfolds with historical consistency.

(3) The Empirical Argument

Personally speaking, I have experienced a substantial change. The day I was converted I walked out of my house cursing God, and then I came home praising him. How does this happen? My experience tells me that this is not some ordinary book. I’ve been moved to tears reading other books, but this book actually reads me, wrecks me, and rebuilds me. What’s more, I’ve seen and experienced this same thing with other people. This change is not limited to gender, ethnicity, geography, or even time. This book claims to change lives, and it actually does.

(4) The Logical Argument

There is a single, coherent theme throughout the book that the glory of God is paramount. If God were to write a book, this is how he would write it. If man were to write a book, this is not how he would write it. It has the “ring of truth” as C. S. Lewis would say. Man would tend to diminish his defects and exaggerate his virtues; the Bible seems to do the opposite. It maintains the dignity of humanity but also shows its brokenness. Here we see the glory of God on display. This brings me to another aspect of this argument. If you survey world religions, most will agree that there is a problem, and they exist to help us with this it. However, only biblical Christianity actually maintains a God who does not compromise. Every other plan of salvation has God bending his righteousness to show love. Man and God partner together to achieve salvation. However, with the Bible God does not compromise. He maintains and demonstrates his righteousness while showing forth his love! On the cross, God is both the just and the justifier (Rom. 3:26). This means that he does not compromise. Think about this: the Bible maintains that all of God’s attributes are intact, no dimples, defects, or deflation! However, without the cross (and outside of the Bible) you have a god who compromises something to bring salvation. This reminds me of God’s infinite wisdom, love, mercy, and grace—as well as his authorship of the Bible.

(5) The Christological Argument

This one seals the deal for me. Here it is a nutshell: since Jesus rose from the dead he is God; therefore, his view of the Bible is the right one. Jesus believed the Bible was divinely inspired (Mt. 4:2; Mt. 22:31-32), authoritative (Lk. 4; Jn. 10:34-36; 12:47-48); powerful (Mt. 5:17-18; Jn. 6:63; Jn. 17:17); and about him (Lk: 24:25-27, 44-47; Jn. 5:46-47). Furthermore, he believed the Bible was historically accurate. “In the Gospels we see Jesus reference Abel, Noah, Abraham, Sodom and Gomorrah, Isaac and Jacob, manna in the wilderness, the serpent in the wilderness, Moses as the lawgiver, David and Solomon, the Queen of Sheba, Elijah and Elisha, the widow of Zarephath, Naaman, Zechariah, and even Jonah, never questioning a single event, a single miracle, or a single historical claim. Jesus clearly believed in the historicity of biblical history.” (DeYoung, Taking God at His Word ). Having Jesus’s bibliology is never a bad idea.

After all of this, we must remember that there is nothing wrong with the Bible. It is perfect and clear. Our problem is with our reception; we are fallen.

I was reminded of this recently during a discussion with a waiter during a lunch meeting with some friends. As we got to talking with the gentleman, we came upon the subject of the Bible. In time he let us know that he didn’t accept the Bible, because he couldn’t be sure that it was God’s Word. He didn’t trust it ultimately. In another round of conversations, our waiter began telling us about his cat. Without blinking, he relayed how his cat talks to him and how he can understand it. We clarified to be sure he meant actual words, and in fact, he did. He was sure that his cat was speaking to him in a clear, understandable way.

The effects of sin are pervasive and persistent. However, God can and does use his powerful Word to bring us to faith in him. It is this Word that we must be ready to share and even defend with others.

Erik Raymond is the senior pastor at Redeemer Fellowship Church in Metro Boston. He and his wife, Christie, have six children. He blogs at Ordinary Pastor . You can follow him on Twitter .

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Reflections

You are here, a god worth believing in.

“God is love.” I remember sitting in Sunday School as a young child learning this. Repeatedly, although framed in a different story each week, I would hear about God’s love, God’s power, and God’s abiding presence. 

I know that God hears my cries and invites me deeper into belief, deeper into love through my questions. I know that God is in each of these very messy places in life.

However, as I grew older, it became more and more challenging to sustain my young Sunday school student confidence in these concepts. As I learned more about the world, I had more and more questions about God. If God is all-powerful, then why is there so much pain and suffering in the world? If God is always with us, then why do so many people feel lonely? If God is love, then why do hate and prejudice even exist? Why are there so many heartbreaking stories in the news every night? Is God absent? Is God apathetic? And above all, why should I believe in a God who doesn’t seem to be living up to the reputation as an all-powerful God who is love?

Questions As Old As Time

As a divinity school student, then as a youth ministry leader and now as a pastor, I have come to appreciate how prevalent these struggles are. The children and youth in my church wonder these same things. The adults who come to worship and Bible study come with these uncertainties on their hearts. My colleagues wrestle with these questions regularly. Answers seem few and far between. But that really shouldn’t be surprising. These questions are as old as time. Even the scriptures, written to teach us about God’s mighty power and God’s love, are full of them. I think that’s because by asking these questions, we find a God that is worth believing in.

Human beings ask questions incessantly. Throughout the Bible, there are dozens upon dozens of questions about God’s presence, love, and power, even about God’s very existence. And each time, God answers by calling the people back into belief, back into caring for their neighbors, back into God’s unending love. No, God’s love does not magically make the challenges go away. God’s love is not the simplistic kind of love seen in rom-com movies. It’s the stubborn, active love of real life that isn’t afraid of the messiness of life. It’s the kind of love that’s willing to go so far as to experience death on a cross. That’s not an easy love in which to participate, but that’s the love God reveals throughout scripture and throughout the world. 

The World’s Messiness

In the scriptures, God’s story is told across thousands of years and dozens of generations. There are times of peace and prosperity, but more often there are times of strife and struggle, times when people rebel against God, times when people choose to be prejudiced against those on the margins of society. And in their anguish people ask “Why?” In response, God calls out to the people of the scriptures and reminds them of God’s abiding presence. God continually calls the people to work harder to love and care for all of God’s beloved, especially those who are forgotten or who are crushed by systems in society. In their questions, God invites people to stretch a little further in their belief and in their love. And just like in those stories in the scriptures, today God as love is always inspiring us to participate in this love, asking us to love God with all our heart, soul, and strength, and love our neighbors as ourselves, even when it all seems to be too much. 

The more I dive into scripture, the more these stories reveal their depth and connect with the world we live in today, and the more I want to be a part of God’s love, even as that love pulls me into the messiness of the world and refuses to relent. This tenacious, active, loving God is the kind of God I want to believe in, the kind of God I need, the God who never gives up, always urging us to be better at loving. 

The Love That Persists

We live in a world that seems to give us every reason not to believe in God: trends of secularism, public atrocities, injustices, reigns of terror, and social upheaval. In a culture that seems to have moved away from God and that challenges our faith in so many ways, it is hard to lean into the love of God, to trust and believe in God’s dynamic love in this world. And frankly, I cannot come to that place on my own. 

But in the questions I ask as I struggle with the heartbreak on the news, the prevalence of prejudice and hatred, the loneliness of a world that would often like to forget about God, I lean on the stories in scripture. Just as it has been true for thousands of years, I know that God hears my cries and invites me deeper into belief, deeper into love through my questions. I know that God is in each of these very messy places. I know God is present in the love that persists even when it seems impossible. God is with us reminding us that we are beloved, inspiring us to keep fighting, keep working to be better and do better. And when that task feels overwhelming, I find myself returning to what I’ve known since Sunday school, and what I hear every week in worship: God is love. In the strength of God’s own perfect love I can hold onto my belief in an almighty God of truth, justice, and love, always calling me back to find hope.

God is love that has been around for as long as time and will be around forever, love that is not bound by death, love that offers resurrection and life in response to the worst that the world offers. We aren’t offered answers as to why life is as heartbreaking and painful and difficult as it is, but we are given hope and courage that God will hear our questions and will continually invite us back to belief, back to love, and back to God. 

That’s the kind of love, the kind of God I believe in, especially when I watch the news and feel the heartbreak. And I dare to say, that is the kind of love, the kind of God that we need to be showing and teaching to the world because that’s the God of love the world needs to know and experience.

The Rev. Katie McNeal ’15 M.Div., ’16 S.T.M. is pastor of  St. John Lutheran Church  in Mars, PA. Previously she was director of youth and family ministries at  St. James Lutheran Church  in Southbury, CT. She is a 2012 graduate of Wittenberg University, where she majored in biochemistry/molecular biology and music.

Why Do People Believe in God?

The evolution of religious belief..

Posted August 21, 2018 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma

• Early in the history of humans, nobody believed in a god of any sort.
• Religious belief is considerably lower in developed countries compared with the underdeveloped world.
• Believing that God has a plan helps people regain some sense of control, or at least acceptance.

Why do people believe in God? For most people in the world, the answer seems obvious: Because it’s self-evident that God exists. From the point of view of the believer, the really puzzling question is how anyone could not believe.

And yet, as University of California at Irvine psychologist Brett Mercier and his colleagues point out in a recent article, there was once a time in the prehistory of our species when nobody believed in a god of any sort. Our evolutionary ancestors were all atheists, but somewhere along the way they found religion. So we’re back to our original question: Why do people believe in God?

As is common practice in evolutionary science, Mercier and his colleagues distinguish between ultimate and proximate causes. An ultimate cause explains how a behavior evolved in the first place, while a proximate cause outlines the conditions in which that evolved behavior will be performed. Consider, for example, birds flying south for the winter. The ultimate cause of bird migration is the increase in survival and reproduction experienced by those who seasonally moved to warmer climates where food was plentiful. In contrast, the proximate cause is the decrease in daylight hours, serving as a trigger that it’s time to head south.

Religious belief of some sort is a nearly universal feature of humanity, so there’s quite likely some ultimate evolutionary cause that explains it. At the same time, not all people are religious, and furthermore the forms of belief among the religious range widely, so we need to understand the proximate causes for this variation. In their article, Mercier and colleagues outline several ultimate and proximate causes for religious belief.

Fully modern humans arrived on the scene about a quarter-million years ago, and until quite recently they all lived hunter-gatherer lifestyles. In these primitive societies, the men hunted, fished, or scavenged for meat, while the women gathered fruits, roots, and vegetables. They lived in small groups of around 100 to 150 people because this was the largest population that the surrounding terrain could support.

Still, these groups were considerably larger than the societies of primate species, which tend to number in the few dozen range. Furthermore, humans are far more capable of cooperation than other primates, enabled by certain evolved cognitive mechanisms. Chief among these is a sense of agency . As tool users, humans quickly developed an understanding that they can intentionally cause things to happen. The nut cracked open because I smashed it with a rock. The apple fell because I shook the tree.

Humans then apply this sense of agency to interpreting social interactions. That is to say, we not only believe we have agency, we also believe others have agency as well. Thus, we judge the actions of others depending on whether we deem them to be intentional or not. We can easily forgive the person who accidentally steps on our foot, but we really need an explanation and an apology if someone purposely treads on our toes.

In fact, we’re rather hypersensitive about other people’s agency, inferring intention where none existed. For example, when someone cuts us off in traffic, we generally assume they did it on purpose—that is, knowing full well how dangerously they’re driving—rather than supposing they looked but just didn’t see us. We’re quick to assume that people act purposefully and discount the extent to which people’s behaviors are shaped by their current circumstances and limitations.

Because of hypersensitive agency detection, we also have a tendency to infer intentionality in natural processes or inanimate objects. Beliefs in water sprites and woodland spirits, specters and spooks, ghosts and demons, are ancient and observed in every culture around the world. Because the natural world is complex and acts in mysterious ways, we detect agency all around us.

By the way, if you think that you—an intelligent human being living in modern society—are free of such superstitious nonsense, you need to ask yourself: Have you ever begged your car to start on a cold winter morning? Or have you ever complained that your computer has a mind of its own because it doesn’t behave the way you want it to? We tend to automatically detect agency in inanimate objects whenever the situation is unpredictable and out of our control.

This kind of animistic thinking —that is, the belief that supernatural agency inhabits the world and can influence events—is a universal human trait. Such thinking is common in children, and as adults our animistic thinking is shaped by the norms of our culture. Animistic beliefs are also common in hunter-gatherer societies, but what they don’t have is organized religion.

Some 15,000 years ago, humans gradually began adopting agriculture. At first, humans domesticated a few animals and tended gardens to supplement their hunting and gathering, but eventually, all but a few societies around the world shifted solely to farming and herding. Agriculture can support many more people per acre of land compared with hunting and gathering, but this came with a cost.

As long as our group sizes were small, we had the psychological mechanisms to deal effectively with the members of our community. If you live day in and day out with the same 150 people, you get to know them really well. But if your numbers are in the thousands or tens of thousands, most of the people you interact with on a daily basis are strangers. Thus was life in the first cities that arose thanks to the food surpluses that agriculture yielded.

At this point, we see cultural evolution taking place. Human existence depends on cooperation. When we live in small groups, cheaters are punished by other members, and they quickly learn that they have to get along. But in anonymous societies, it’s easy to take advantage of others, as there’s no way for the rest of the group to punish those who take advantage of the system. The solution was to invent ever-watchful gods who’ll punish cheaters for us. Thus, organized religion grew hand-in-hand with the rise of the city-state.

Fast forward a dozen millennia, and here we are living in a technologically advanced society driven by science that tells us the world moves according to the laws of physics and not the whims of spirits or deities. Nevertheless, religious belief in one or more gods that watch over our actions and judge us accordingly is quite common. At the same time, religious belief has dropped precipitously over the last century, and here we need to look at its proximate causes.

Mercier and colleagues divide the proximate causes of religious belief into three types: cognitive, motivational, and societal. One cognitive factor is an analytical thinking style. People who tend to act according to reason rather than intuition are also less likely to believe in God. Perhaps relatedly, we also see a tendency for people who are higher in intelligence to hold agnostic or atheistic beliefs. In contrast, people who are high in what’s commonly called “ emotional intelligence ”—that is, the ability to easily discern the emotions and motives of others—also tend to be more religious. Of course, it’s exactly this ability to read others’ minds that led to the rise of religious belief in the first place, hundreds of thousands of years ago on the African savanna.

There are also motivational reasons for religious belief. People who are socially isolated tend to have more religious faith, perhaps allowing them to feel they’re not truly alone. Likewise, people facing death are more likely to express faith in God and an afterlife. The old saying that there are no atheists on the battlefield is no doubt true to a large extent. Furthermore, faith in God increases when situations become uncontrollable, as in the case of natural disasters. Believing that God has a plan helps people regain some sense of control, or at least acceptance.

Another motivational factor is self-enhancement. If you live in a society where religion is prized, it’s in your best interest to say you believe, whether you truly do or not. I’m sure there are plenty of doubters in the pews at Sunday services, though none will admit it. (I was one of those for most of my teenage years.) And it’s not uncommon to hear stories of priests or pastors who’ve lost their faith but continue to preach because it’s the only way they can make a living.

Finally, there are societal factors that influence the degree of religious belief within societies. As a general rule, religious belief is considerably lower in developed countries compared with the underdeveloped world. For instance, Japan has one of the highest standards of living in the world, but only 4 percent of its population claims to be religious. Traditionally, Japan was a Buddhist country, and religion played an important role in the daily lives of the Japanese until after World War II. A similar trend has occurred in Western Europe, which many social scientists now characterize as “post-Christian.”

The United States, with its high standard of living and high religiosity , is the glaring exception. However, as Mercier and his colleagues point out, Japan and Western European have universal health care and extensive social safety nets, as opposed to the U.S. The Japanese and the Europeans know their governments will come to their aid in their hour of need. But the laissez-faire attitudes of American society make people’s futures less certain and the belief in a benevolent God more attractive.

Although many people in industrialized societies have abandoned traditional organized religion, many of them still confess to some sort of spiritual belief, such as a life force or divine spirit that pervades nature and humanity. As societies become affluent and egalitarian, perhaps people perceive less need for a benevolent God to keep watch over us. Organized religion may no longer be needed in such societies, but it’s still human nature to perceive agency in the complexity and unpredictability of the world, even when there is none.

Mercier, B., Kramer, S. R., and Shariff, A. F. (2018). Belief in god: Why people believe, and why they don’t. Current Directions in Psychological Science. Advance online publication. DOI: 10.1177/0963721418754491

David Ludden, Ph.D. , is a professor of psychology at Georgia Gwinnett College.

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Why Do You Believe In God

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Essay on God’s Importance In Life

Students are often asked to write an essay on God’s Importance In Life in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on God’s Importance In Life

Understanding god’s role.

Many people believe in a higher power known as God. They see God as a guide who helps them choose right from wrong. When life gets tough, thinking of God can give comfort and hope.

Learning Through Stories

Religious books are full of stories about God’s love and power. These tales teach kids about bravery, kindness, and honesty. They often look to these stories for lessons on how to live well.

Prayer and Strength

Praying to God is like talking to a friend. It can make you feel strong and calm. When you’re scared or sad, praying might bring peace and a sense of not being alone.

Belonging to a Community

Believing in God can connect you with others. Many gather in places like churches or temples to worship together. This can create a feeling of family and support among the people.

250 Words Essay on God’s Importance In Life

Learning right from wrong.

God is often seen as a teacher of what is good and what is bad. Different religions have their own rules that God has given them. These rules help people decide how to act and treat others. With God’s teachings, they learn to be kind, honest, and fair.

Finding Strength in Tough Times

Life can be hard sometimes. When people face problems, they may pray to God for help. They believe God listens and gives them strength to get through tough times. This belief can make them feel less alone and more able to handle life’s challenges.

Bringing People Together

Belief in God can bring people together. In churches, temples, mosques, and other places of worship, people gather to pray and celebrate their faith. This creates a sense of community and belonging, which is very important in life.

Hope for the Future

Thinking about God can give people hope for the future. They believe that God has a plan for them and that everything will work out for the best. This hope can keep them going when things are difficult and can inspire them to work towards a better future.

500 Words Essay on God’s Importance In Life

Many people believe in a higher power known as God. They see God as a source of strength, guidance, and love. In this essay, we will explore why God plays a significant role in the lives of believers.

Comfort in Tough Times

Guidance for right choices.

Every day, we make choices. Some are easy, and some are hard. Believers turn to God for help in making the right decisions. They may read holy books, like the Bible or the Quran, to learn what God teaches about living a good life. By following these teachings, they feel they can choose the path that will make them and the people around them happy.

Feeling Loved and Valued

Everyone wants to feel loved. Believers find this love in God. They think of God as a parent who loves them no matter what. This love gives them confidence. It makes them feel important and valued. When they know God loves them, they also learn to love themselves and others.

Learning to Forgive

We all make mistakes, and sometimes we hurt others. God teaches about forgiveness. Believers try to follow this teaching by forgiving those who have wronged them. They also ask God to forgive their own mistakes. This helps them live without anger and bitterness.

Building a Community

Believing in God often brings people together. They gather to worship, celebrate, and help each other. This creates a community where people care for one another. In this community, they share their love for God and find friends who support them in their beliefs.

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Jesus is their savior, Trump is their candidate. Ex-president’s backers say he shares faith, values

Donald Trump’s support from white evangelicals and other conservative Christians is as strong as ever. And he’s increasingly infusing his campaign events with Christian rhetoric and imagery. (AP Video/ Jessie Wardarski)

Sherrie Cotterman stands for a portrait while in line at a campaign rally for former president Donald Trump in Vandalia, Ohio, on Saturday, March 16, 2024. Trump, who is coasting to a third Republican presidential nomination, continues to draw strong support from evangelicals and other conservative Christians. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

Hats reading, “God, Guns and Trump,” and “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president,” are sold at a campaign rally for former president Donald Trump in Vandalia, Ohio, on Saturday, March 16, 2024. Trump, who is coasting into a third Republican presidential nomination, continues to draw strong support from evangelicals and other conservative Christians. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

A supporter of Donald Trump attends a rally for the former president in Vandalia, Ohio, on Saturday, March 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

Philip Hinson, a Southern Baptist, holds a Trump 2024 hat in his hands at the former president’s campaign rally in Vandalia, Ohio, on Saturday, March 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

Philip Hinson stands for a portrait while in line at Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Vandalia, Ohio, on Saturday, March 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

Thomas Isbell sells Donald Trump merchandise at a campaign rally for the former president, in Vandalia, Ohio, on Saturday, March 16, 2024. The former president has increasingly infused his campaign events with Christian rhetoric and imagery and continues to receive support from white evangelicals and other conservative Christians. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

Hats reading, “God, Guns and Trump,” and “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president,” are sold at a campaign rally for former president Donald Trump in Vandalia, Ohio, on Saturday, March 16, 2024. The former president has increasingly infused his campaign events with Christian rhetoric and imagery and continues to receive support from white evangelicals and other conservative Christians. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

Thomas Isbell sells Donald Trump merchandise at a campaign rally for the former president, in Vandalia, Ohio, on Saturday, March 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

Jody Picagli, a lifelong Catholic, stands for a portrait at a campaign rally for former president Donald Trump in Vandalia, Ohio, on Saturday, March 16, 2024. Trump has increasingly infused his campaign events with Christian rhetoric and imagery and continues to receive support from white evangelicals and other conservative Christians. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

Trey Mullins and Manduria Belotte, from the University of Dayton, stand for a portrait at a campaign rally for former president Donald Trump in Vandalia, Ohio, on Saturday, March 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

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As Donald Trump increasingly infuses his campaign with Christian trappings while coasting to a third Republican presidential nomination, his support is as strong as ever among evangelicals and other conservative Christians.

“Trump supports Jesus, and without Jesus, America will fall,” said Kimberly Vaughn of Florence, Kentucky, as she joined other supporters of the former president entering a campaign rally near Dayton, Ohio.

Many of the T-shirts and hats that were worn and sold at the rally in March proclaimed religious slogans such as “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president” and “God, Guns & Trump.” One man’s shirt declared, “Make America Godly Again,” with the image of a luminous Jesus putting his supportive hands on Trump’s shoulders.

Many attendees said in interviews they believed Trump shared their Christian faith and values. Several cited their opposition to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights , particularly to transgender expressions.

Nobody voiced concern about Trump’s past conduct or his present indictments on criminal charges, including allegations that he tried to hide hush money payments to a porn actor during his 2016 campaign. Supporters saw Trump as representing a religion of second chances.

And for many, Trump is a champion of Christianity and patriotism.

“I believe he believes in God and our military men and women, in our country, in America,” said Tammy Houston of New Lexington, Ohio.

“I put my family first, and on a larger scale, it’s America first,” said Sherrie Cotterman of Sidney, Ohio. “And I would any day of the week, take a president that openly knows he needs the strength from God over his own.”

In many ways, this is a familiar story.

About 8 in 10 white evangelical Christians supported Trump in 2020, according to AP VoteCast , and Pew Research Center’s validated voter survey found that a similar share supported him in 2016 .

But this is a new campaign, and that support has remained durable — even though Republican voters in the early primaries had several openly conservative Christian candidates to choose from, none of whom faced the legal troubles and misconduct allegations that Trump does. In the Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina Republican primary contests earlier this year, Trump won between 55% and 69% of white evangelical voters, according to AP VoteCast.

Trump even criticized one competitor, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for signing strict abortion curbs into law. In past years, some Trump surrogates have portrayed Trump as friendly to the LGBTQ+ community.

Trump was the only Republican candidate facing scores of criminal charges, ranging from allegations that he conspired to overturn his 2020 election defeat to his current trial on allegations he falsified business records in seeking illegally to sway the 2016 election with hush money to porn actor Stormy Daniels.

Trump was also the only GOP candidate with a history of casino ventures and two divorces, as well as allegations of sexual misconduct — one of them affirmed by a civil court verdict.

Republican primary voters still overwhelmingly chose Trump.

This has frustrated a minority of conservative evangelicals who see Trump as an unrepentant poser, using the Bible and prayer sessions for photo props. They see him as lacking real faith and facing credible, serious misconduct allegations while campaigning with incendiary rhetoric and authoritarian ambitions.

Karen Swallow Prior, a Christian author and literary scholar who has spoken against fellow evangelicals’ embrace of Trump, said this support in 2024 is familiar but “intensified.”

In the past, she said Trump supporters hoped but weren’t certain that Trump shared their Christian faith.

“Now his supporters believe themselves,” she said. “Despite the fact that Trump clearly wavers on abortion and he wavers on LGBTQ issues, those things are just ignored, they’re just erased out of the narrative.”

At the Ohio rally, several attendees cited their belief that Trump has followed the Christian path of repenting and starting a new life.

“We’ve all come from sinning. Jesus sat with sinners, so he’s going to sit with Trump,” Vaughn said. “It’s not about where Trump came from, it’s about where he’s going and where he’s trying to take us.”

The Ohio rally, like other Trump events, featured a recording of the national anthem sung by some of those convicted for crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021 , attack on the Capitol, whom Trump called “patriots.”

At the rally’s entrance, one group handed out pamphlets urging attendees both to “trust in Jesus Christ for your salvation” and to support the “J6 patriots.”

Caleb Cinnamon, 37, of Dayton, identified as a Christian and said opposing abortion is a top priority. He cited Trump’s three Supreme Court appointments, who proved decisive in the 2022 decision overturning of the Roe v. Wade precedent that had legalized abortion nationwide.

“Donald Trump’s really the first president who’s not only vocalized an anti-abortion stance but also put action behind it,” he said. “Republicans since the 1990s were saying ‘We’re going to do this about abortion,’ and then they don’t.”

Jody Picagli of Englewood, Ohio, said her Catholic faith and views on abortion are central.

“I’m a big right-to-life person,” she said. “That’s huge for me. And just morals. I think the moral compass is so out of whack right now. And we need religion and church back in here.”

She acknowledged that, with the Supreme Court turning the abortion issue over to the states, a future President Trump may not impact abortion law.

“But I know he’ll never go to an abortion clinic and visit it, like our vice president did,” she said, alluding to Kamala Harris’ tour of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Minnesota in March.

Christian supporters of Trump did also cite non-religious issues — from foreign policy and immigration to gas prices and inflation.

Robert Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute and an author of books on white supremacy in American Christianity, said the strong evangelical support for Trump isn’t surprising. But he said that in a 2023 PRRI poll, less than half of white evangelicals said that abortion was a critical issue to them personally. More than half said that five others were a critical issue, including human trafficking, public schools, rising prices, immigration and crime.

“One of the biggest myths about white evangelical support for Trump is this idea that it’s really about abortion and they’re holding their nose and voting for Trump,” Jones said.

He added that Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants “invading the country and changing our cultural heritage” resonates with his audience.

The slogan “Make America Great Again” echoes an “ethno-religious vision of a white Christian America, just barely underneath the surface,” Jones said.

He acknowledged the racial lines aren’t absolute, with Trump attracting Black supporters such as South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott.

The Ohio rally included a vast majority of white attendees but with some Black and other ethnic groups represented.

Earlier this year, Trump hit multiple applause lines in speaking to a conservative audience at the National Religious Broadcasters convention.

“We will protect Christians in our schools and in our military and our government,” Trump said. “We will protect God in our public square. … I will protect the content that is pro-God.”

Trump pledged a federal task force to fight the “persecution against Christians in America” and “the toxic poison of gender ideology,” saying “God created two genders, male and female.”

Trump’s rallies take on the symbols, rhetoric and agenda of Christian nationalism, which typically includes a belief that America was founded to be a Christian nation and seeks to privilege Christianity in public life.

Trump endorsed a Bible edition that includes U.S. founding documents and the lyrics to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.”

“This is a Bible specifically for a kind of white evangelical audience that sees themselves as the rightful inheritors of the country,” Jones said, citing a 2023 PRRI poll in which about half of white evangelicals agreed that God intended America as a promised land for European Christians.

Trump’s campaign events have the feel of a worship service. The former president has shared a “God Made Trump” video depicting him in messianic terms. Jones said Trump builds on the messianic theme with statements like, “They’re not after me, they’re after you. I’m just standing in the way.”

But Mark DeVine, a Southern Baptist pastor and seminary professor from Birmingham, Alabama, wrote in the online journal American Reformer that conservative Christians support Trump because “elected Democrats and Democrat-serving, unelected bureaucrats” have an “evil” agenda on issues ranging from abortion to gender to the border to pandemic lockdowns that kept churches closed.

“Trumpers want to shield themselves, their children, their communities, and the nation they love from the woke, totalitarian onslaught now being unleashed upon them where they live, work, study, play, and worship,” he wrote.

At the Ohio rally, some said they believed the nation or its founding documents, such as the Bill of Rights, had Christian origins, though historians dispute such assertions.

Some Trump supporters voiced hope for a more Christian America.

Thomas Isbell of Greensboro, North Carolina, who has set up vending booths for years at Trump rallies around the country, said his “God, Guns & Trump” shirts are a top seller.

“It’s a Christian country,” he said, adding that if he were president, he would only allow public worship by Christians.

“We’re not going to set up a temple to no other gods in our land,” he said.

AP visual journalist Jessie Wardarski contributed.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.