There is a difference between holding loosely to beliefs where Scripture is not clear and holding to demonstrably false beliefs where the Bible is abundantly clear. When one denies the clear biblical teaching of Scripture, it becomes an issue of rebellion against God and His word placing one in serious danger of God’s judgment.

Yet, a recent survey from Ligonier ministries shows that the vast majority of professing Evangelicals actually hold to heretical doctrines that deny the clear teaching of Scripture.

According to the State of Theology survey, 48 percent of Evangelicals believe that God changes, that He “learns and adapts to various situations.” Only 43 percent believed that He does not change. This flies in the face of the clear teaching of Scripture including Malachi 3:6, “For I the Lord do not change,” Hebrews 13:8, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever,” and James 1:17, which describes God as one “whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.”

Even worse than that, the survey found that 71 percent of Evangelicals reject the doctrine of original sin and believe that we are all born good whereas only 21 percent hold to the essential doctrine. Ligonier puts it this way:

When God created the world, everything He made was good (Gen. 1:10, 21, 25, 31). Yet through Adam and Eve’s rebellion in the garden of Eden, humankind became corrupted. The Bible teaches the concept of original sin, which means that since the fall, every human being inherits a sin nature from the time of their conception (Ps. 51:5; Rom. 5:12). In other words, we are not sinners because we sin; rather, we sin because we are sinners.

This false belief isn’t limited to those in apostate denominations. I’ve also witnessed much of this heresy within mainstream and even Southern Baptist circles and Southern Baptist seminaries are even graduating future pastors who reject original sin. Tony Evans, a popular Evangelical preacher, is a proponent of this Pelagian heresy, too.

Another false belief that the majority of professing Christians believe is that church membership doesn’t matter. While there is much debate on what exactly defines a local church, the Scriptures are clear that being part of a local body of believers is how one expresses their membership in the universal Church body. Yet, only 36 percent of Evangelicals believe that church membership matters where 56 percent do not.

43 percent of professing Evangelicals reject the deity of Christ, according to the survey, 38 percent believe that the Christian faith is merely a personal rather than objective truth, 37 percent believe that “gender identity” is a matter of choice, and 28 percent believe that the Bible’s condemnation of homosexual behavior doesn’t apply today.

Again, we’re not talking about the mainstream apostate Protestant denominations, we’re talking about Evangelicals who are supposed to believe that the Bible is true, inerrant, and authoritative in all matters.