Most Americans Believe Angels Helped Them

Improved than partial of Americans-55 percent-say they transport been sound from harm by a guardian angel, a recognition that stunned researchers at the Corporation for Studies of Holiness at Baylor Seminary in Texas. The high degree of private who pilfer this belief, which seems to attain straddling religious, native, and civilizing lines, is "a end astonishment what this is not a distrust, do you judge in guardian angels or do you judge in angels. This is a very dedicated question: Do you judge you transport been sound from harm by a guardian angel? Do you judge you avoided an condition in addition to the official group of a guardian angel?" says Christopher Bader, a sociologist at Baylor and an ISR learned. "To find out that second than partial of the American citizen believes this was scandalous to me. I did not understand that."

The distrust was part of a finalize cherish of the nation's religious beliefs and practices that the begin conducted in 2007 with help from the Gallup Organization. According to the solicit votes, which surveyed about 1,700 Americans, 45 percent of private say they've had at least two religious encounters-and the same as bigoted Protestants are second accountable to dispatch religious or mystical encounters than are liberal Protestants, Catholics, or Jews, the researchers found such experiences slip away with life-threatening dominance in about all religious groups.

As in the if possible wave of the cherish in 2005, 11 percent of respondents held they had "no religion," yet two-thirds of the private in this group reserve spoken some belief in God and many were found to be immediately "unchurched" wish than "impious." A collection of Americans who say they're impious reserve pray (with 32 percent praying habitually), and about a third of them say they judge in Satan, hell, and demons. About partial judge in angels and ghosts.

These and other have a disagreement from the cherish transport been open in a new book called Equally Americans Really Regard, on paper by Rodney Unproductive, a expansive sciences educator and co-director of the ISR. -Heather Wax