There’s been some talk lately about americans believing in guardian angels. From Time:

In a poll of 1700 respondents, 55% answered affirmatively to the statement, “I was protected from harm by a guardian angel.” The responses defied standard class and denominational assumptions about religious belief; the majority held up regardless of denomination, region or education — though the figure was a little lower (37%) among respondents earning more than $150,000 a year.

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Says Bader, “If you ask whether people believe in guardian angels, a lot of people will say, ’sure.’ But this is different. It’s experiential. It means that lots of Americans are having these lived supernatural experiences.”

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What’s interesting about the Baylor findings on guardian angel experiences is that they cross all boundaries. They have scriptural writ (in Psalm 91 and elsewhere). They are clearly experiential. And guardian angels are a prominent part of Catholic belief that happens to float freely outside of a sacrament. The cross-spectrum legitimacy of the notion of angelic interventions may free Americans to engage in the kind of folk faith that is part of almost any religious system but is not always officially acknowledged.

I’m not going to go through all the wrong assumptions made (you can see those for yourself), but after some very little thought, one thing strikes me about this: Doesn’t anyone involved in this study realised that “I was protected from harm by a guardian angel” is a leading question (statement, in this case)?

Asking someone who believes in god “Have you ever been saved by a guardian angel” prompts them to think back on their lives and consider any potential dangerous situation that they got out of, and they’ll think, “yeah, it was probably that!”

If they had asked people whether they had at some point in their life been involved in some situation that threatened to harm them but escaped, and then asked them what they attributed this escape to, I suspect the results would have been very different. Some would still have attributed their escape to angels, but others would have turned directly to god. Yet others would thank the stars - and, I think, a sizeable portion might have been able to identify what really got them out of their pickle: Chance (luck, some would call it), their own biology (as Digital Cuttlefish points out), the aid of friends, the skills of doctors…

Polls can yield very interesting results, but don’t write off a majority of people as gullible or stupid because of a poorly worded one. (They might of course still be gullible or stupid, but this poll wouldn’t tell you.)

guardian angels, religion, polls