How Many Americans Believe in the Resurrection of Christ?

Published: October 20, 2025

Easter, Empty tomb — Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

By Michaela Gordoni

Lifeway Research and Ligonier Ministries recently discovered that two-thirds of Americans believe that Christ’s body was literally resurrected.

Two-thirds of American adults say the “biblical accounts of the physical (bodily) resurrection of Jesus are completely accurate” and “actually occurred.” Slightly more (71%) believe in the Trinity, that “there is one true God in three persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit,” Crosswalk reported.

“While many aspects of American society can accurately be described as secular, large numbers of Americans have theological beliefs that line up with the Bible’s teaching,” said Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research.

Slightly over two-thirds believe that “God is unchanging.” Another two-thirds say God is a perfect being and cannot make a mistake.” Over half (56%) of Americans say that “God counts a person as righteous not because of one’s works but only because of one’s faith in Jesus Christ.”

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More than half (60%) of the respondents strongly disagreed that “Even the smallest sin deserves eternal damnation,” and 13% strongly agreed.

In 2017, ComRes found that only 75% of U.K. Christian adults claimed to believe in the resurrection of Christ. Of everyone surveyed, including non-religious candidates, 50% said they did not believe in the resurrection at all, BBC reported. The study also found that 20% of non-religious people believe there is some form of life after death.

Professor Linda Woodhead, of the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University, said, “This polling confirms that Britain is now split down the middle between those who call themselves Christian and those who say no religion, but this is not a simple division between religious and secular. A significant proportion of Christians don’t believe in life after death and a significant number of the non-religious do.”

Commenting for the Church of England, the Bishop of Manchester, the Right Reverend David Walker, said, “This important and welcome survey proves that many British people, despite not being regular churchgoers, hold core Christian beliefs. Alongside them it finds surprisingly high levels of religious belief among those who follow no specific religion, often erroneously referred to as secularists or atheists.”

Rasmussen previously reported that the amount of Americans who believed in the resurrection in 2013, which was 64%, was the same in 2020. This year, that number jumped by two points.

The Global of Center for Religious Research concluded from the data, “The statistics in the BBC’s survey show that Christian beliefs are widespread in British society, just as they are in American society. Furthermore, some adults who describe themselves as nonreligious hold religious beliefs, while some adults who describe themselves as Christian hold secular views.”

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