ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, April 15, 1997 TAG: 9704150095
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CODY LOWE THE ROANOKE TIMES
Young people fear violence and drugs, but these problems can be fixed, pollster tells Roanoke College.
George Gallup Jr. is a guy who's seen plenty of trends.
Now semiretired, he's served more than 35 years with the Gallup Organization that his father founded in 1935 as a pioneer in scientific polling research.
A lot of those trends are of "unfortunate" things, Gallup told a Roanoke College audience Monday.
In a recent survey of the nation's youth, for instance, Gallup found a generation afraid. They fear violence in their schools; the influence of alcohol and drugs in their lives; they are even afraid in their own homes, of abuse from people who are supposed to love them.
The confidential surveys the organization conducts found that child abuse "is 10 times worse" than the public generally gathers from statistics on reported crimes, Gallup said.
Nevertheless, Gallup remains a man hopeful about the future.
"The good news is that all the problems we face" - crime, alcoholism, divorce, child abuse, and others - "are fixable," Gallup contends.
And in spite of the difficulties they face, the nation's young people say they are generally happy and optimistic. They're looking forward to careers, marriage and families of their own.
The focus of Gallup's address Monday was on trends in religion, a subject that has fascinated him at least since his college days when he majored in it at Princeton University.
A lifelong Episcopalian, he wrote a thesis on the reasons people give for belief in God. Today, in addition to being co-chairman of the Gallup Organization, he is executive director of the Princeton Religion Research Center, which publishes books and other data from religion-based surveys.
Interestingly, he said, despite loud declarations by some that there is a growing atheistic element in American culture, that appears to be untrue. Polling data on belief in God (96 percent say they do), prayer, miracles, the divinity of Christ, and similar questions is almost unchanged since the Gallup Poll began charting them 50 years ago.
The only area noticeably down, he said, is that fewer people say the Bible is "to be taken literally, word for word." Still, almost 80 percent say they believe it is either the literal or "inspired" word of God.
Gallup concludes that the nation's religious beliefs are broad, but not necessarily deep.
Of the eight in 10 Americans who call themselves Christians, only half know that Jesus taught the Sermon on the Mount. Although the Ten Commandments are widely viewed as still relevant, only four in 10 Americans could name five of them.
As part of a cure for that shallowness, Gallup urged a rejuvenation of religious education in churches and championed the creation of small faith-based groups within congregations for Bible study and intimate spiritual sharing.
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