Poll results released in late January by Summit.org, a Christian organization, found that more than 67% of Americans “believe that public calls for prayer after a national tragedy are effective in light of the public outpouring of prayer for NFL player Damar Hamlin.”
Hamlin, a 24-year-old player for the Buffalo Bills, went into cardiac arrest during a January game in Cincinnati, Ohio. After the incident, he was in the hospital for more than a week, but he is on the mend.
“This poll reveals that public calls to prayer after Damar Hamlin’s collapse from cardiac arrest on national television and through his miraculous healing have, at least for the moment, brought Americans together across the partisan divide,” said Dr. Jeff Myers, president of Summit.org.
According to a press release, the Summit poll was conducted with McLaughlin and Associates and included 1,000 likely general election voters nationwide surveyed online from Jan. 19 to Jan. 23.
Results indicate a majority of Americans across party lines believe in the effectiveness of public prayer. A little more than 65% of Democratic voters said they “believe that public calls for prayer after a national tragedy are effective,” in light of Hamlin’s incident, as well as 73% of Republican voters and 62% percent of Independent voters.
Older participants were more likely to believe in the effectiveness of public prayer in the wake of Hamlin’s medical attack, per the survey results. Here was the breakdown by age group for the percentage that believed in the effectiveness of calls for public prayer: 77.3% for people age 65 and older, 69.9% for people age 56-65, 67.8% for people age 41-55, 62.3% of people age 30-40, 54.7% of people age 18 to 29.
These results are in line with recent data from Gallup and the Pew Research Center that show percentages of people who identify as religious have been steadily decreasing in the U.S.
Gallup polling indicates that belief in God dropped to a new low last summer and the percentage of people who said they did not have a religion increased from 1-2% from the late 1940s through the 1960s to 21% last year. In particular, the percentage of people who identify as Protestant decreased from 69% to 34%.
“The Center estimates that in 2020, about 64% of Americans, including children, were Christian. People who are religiously unaffiliated, sometimes called religious ‘nones,’ accounted for 30% of the U.S. population,” according to the Pew Research Center. “Adherents of all other religions – including Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists – totaled about 6%.”
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