There is something quietly heartbreaking in a survey that should have been unremarkable. Someone asked American pastors whether they believed Adam and Eve were real people. It is the kind of question that, in another era, would have seemed almost too basic to ask. Like asking a surgeon whether he believes in the human body.
The National Survey of Religious Leaders, which sampled 1,600 clergy from February 2019 through June 2020, found that 87% of evangelical pastors and 89% of Black Protestant clergy affirm a literal Adam and Eve with certainty, while just 25% of mainline Protestants do the same.  Just one in four Catholic priests said they definitely believe Adam and Eve were historical figures.  These are not numbers about people in the pews. These are the shepherds.
It started earlier than the seminaries. It started in the universities, in the religion and theology departments where the professors who would one day train the professors who would train the pastors first learned to hold the text at arm’s length. Tenure made it permanent. Once a professor of divinity achieves tenure at a research university, he or she is no longer accountable to a confession, a congregation, or a creed. They are accountable to their discipline, their peers, and their publication record. Whether they personally believe that Jesus rose from the dead is, institutionally speaking, beside the point. Whether they find the documentary hypothesis compelling, whether they read Genesis as ancient cosmological myth, whether they have quietly concluded that the resurrection is best understood as a communal experience of meaning – none of that affects their standing. The university does not require belief. It requires scholarship. And so generations of theology students have been formed by men and women who were never asked, in any formal sense, whether they believed what they were teaching.
Many Christian universities and seminaries influenced by theological liberalism have long taught that Genesis should be read symbolically rather than historically. A young man or woman enters seminary on fire for the gospel. They want to preach. They want to serve. Over three years, the text they love is handled with a kind of clinical detachment – dissected, contextualized, bracketed. They graduate with credentials and a quiet unease they cannot quite name. They take a congregation. They preach on the weekend. They wonder, in the dark hours of a Tuesday, whether the ground beneath their sermons is solid.
That is not a villain’s story. It is a tragedy. And it begins not with the pastor but with the tenured professor who stopped asking whether any of it was true, because nobody required them to.
C.S. Lewis understood the stakes clearly. “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance,” he wrote. “The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.” A theology classroom that treats the resurrection as one interpretive option among many has already decided, implicitly, that it is moderately important. The students who sit in those chairs carry that assumption with them into the pulpit.
The survey’s Bible data reveals how far the drift has gone. Among mainline clergy, 70% said the Bible is inspired but not historically accurate in all parts, with some sections reflecting the cultural norms of the time and therefore no longer applicable today. When a pastor no longer trusts the text, they cannot fully preach it. When they cannot fully preach it, they find other things to say – helpful things, kind things, therapeutic things. But the bones are gone from the message. Charles Spurgeon saw this coming. “Had the teaching from the pulpit been more clear and decisive,” he warned, “we should not now be living in an age of uncertainty.” He wrote that in the 19th century. The age of uncertainty he feared has arrived, and it is sitting in the pastor’s chair.
A generation ago, a pastor who lost their faith had an obvious path. They resigned. They left with dignity, perhaps with sadness, but with honesty. That exit ramp still exists. Fewer are taking it. The mainline denominational structure, with its pension plans and housing allowances and decades-vested retirement accounts, has made staying the path of least resistance. Doubt becomes a managed condition. The congregation pays the mortgage. The denomination holds the pension. The sermons grow softer, more careful, less costly. Nobody says anything. The building stays open. The lights stay on. And week after week, a pastor stands behind a pulpit and speaks words they are no longer sure they believe to people who came hoping someone would tell them those words are true.
There is no satisfaction in pointing this out. Only sadness.
Doubt is not a sin. Thomas doubted at the tomb. Job doubted in the ash heap. The Psalms are full of people who brought their uncertainty directly to God and were met there. But there is a difference between a soul wrestling honestly with a living God – as in John 20:27, when Jesus invited Thomas to reach out his hand and believe – and a professional drawing a salary to represent convictions they no longer hold. People are free to doubt. What they are not entitled to is a parsonage and a pension plan while doing it on the congregation’s dime.
It is worth saying plainly: a pastor who privately disbelieves the creed or doctrines of their denomination, whichever one it is, but remains in the pulpit for financial reasons is not demonstrating intellectual sophistication. They are demonstrating desperation. The seminary degree that once opened the door to ordained ministry does not, it turns out, open many other doors. There is no robust secular market for someone whose primary credential is three years of graduate-level theology. And so some stay, not out of conviction, not out of a courageous wrestling with God, but because they genuinely do not know what else to do. That is not a profile of a freethinker. It is a profile of someone trapped by the very institution they no longer believe in, unwilling to pay the cost of honesty. The people in the pews, who tithe faithfully and show up hoping to be fed, deserve better than a shepherd who has quietly decided the pasture is not real.
As Spurgeon put it: “You cannot preach conviction of sin unless you have suffered it. You cannot preach repentance unless you have practiced it. You cannot preach faith unless you have exercised it.” Doubt freely. Question openly. But do not pocket the offering plate while doing it.
Only 32% of mainline Protestant leaders said they strongly believed in trying to convert others to their faith, compared to 82% of evangelical pastors. You do not share what you are not sure you have. And people, it turns out, can find community and kindness in many places. What they cannot easily find is someone who looks them in the eye and says, as Paul did in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day. Not as metaphor. As fact.
The membership numbers tell the rest of the story. In 1958, 52 of every 100 Americans belonged to a mainline denomination. By 2024, that figure had fallen to 11 of every 100. The median age of a mainline Protestant today is 59, with 38% already retired. These are not statistics. They are empty chairs. They are families who went looking for something solid and found it somewhere else, or stopped looking altogether.
The Adam question is not a small one. Romans 5:12 is plain: sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin. Remove the first Adam and the second – the one Paul calls the last Adam in 1 Corinthians 15:45 – has nothing to answer for. The story does not work as metaphor because metaphors do not require a crucifixion.
The appropriate response to a pastor in genuine doubt is not mockery. It is the same thing you would offer anyone standing at a difficult threshold: honesty, patience, and the willingness to do the hard work together. That work has to begin upstream – in the classrooms where the next generation of ministers is being formed, and in the honest question of whether the people doing the forming still believe what they are teaching.
