Touched by an angel? Most say they've been protected

[Nostalgia]

A new survey of the USA's religious beliefs and practices finds 55% of all adults — including one in five of those who say they have no religion — believe they have been protected from harm by a guardian angel.


"I would never have expected these numbers. It was the biggest surprise to me in our findings," says sociologist Christopher Bader of Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Baylor today will release results of its second national survey on religion.

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The survey, based on interviews with nearly 1,700 adults in fall 2007, updates Baylor's 2006 findings on religious affiliation and views of God by adding new questions on topics such as gender and politics, the environment and beliefs about evil.

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Members of almost every major religious group sensed angels running heavenly interference: evangelical Protestant, 66%; black Protestant, 81%; mainline Protestant, 55%; Catholic, 57%; Jewish, 10%; other religions, 49%; no religion, 20%.

"People's sense of the divine is remarkably widespread and tangible, even if they don't call it God. Clearly, there's a sense of the sacred prevalent throughout society," says Matthew Gilbert of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, Calif., which studies subjective experiences using scientific techniques.

Just as people have many different images of God, so they have different ways of interpreting "guardian angels" or God's voice, says Kenneth Pargament, a psychology professor at Bowling Green (Ohio) State University who has written on spirituality and the psyche. When people think of being protected, "they may not be envisioning an angel with wings so much as a loved one who has gone before them and is looking after their well-being," Pargament says.

Many respondents said they have "heard the voice of God" or "felt God speaking to me." That too can be an internal spiritual sense, not literally words in their ear, says Pargament.
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