title:  Poll: 0.0% Of Young Icelanders Support Creationism
text: For Americans, religion permeates almost every aspect of our daily lives whether we want it to or not. The United States is so religious, in fact, that when, say, a university instructs its professors to hold inclusive holiday parties, rather than focus solely on Christmas, many people believe Christianity itself is under attack. It is therefore always surprising to see just how non-religious other countries have become while America was busy having its pretend war on Christmas.A shocking new poll out of Iceland demonstrates the degree to which young people are abandoning organized religion. The survey of Icelanders found that while many older people (80.6%) still identified as Christian, those in their 20s or younger were astonishingly non-religious. In fact, when asked whether they believed the story of a biblical creation, like the kind found in American  creation museums , a whopping 0.0% of those 25 or younger said they did. Inversely, 93.9% said they believed the universe was created during a big bang.Of those younger than 25 93.9% said the world had been created in the big bang and 0.0% believed God had created the world. 77.7% of those between 25 and 44 years old believed the world had been created in the big bang and 10.1% believed God had created the world. In all but the oldest age category a majority accepted the big-bang theory. Only 46.1% of those older than 55 believed in the big bang, and nearly a fourth, 24.5% believed God had created the world.Perhaps because of this growing lack of religion, the poll also found that a large proportion of Icelanders of all ages expressed support for  the full separation of church and state. But before televangelist Pat Robertson goes dismissing the entire country as godless heathens, there is a bit of a caveat. As Icelandic Redditor avar points out, the implication that zero percent of young Icelanders don t believe in God is a bit misleading. The poll doesn t go that far.Now, what many outside of Iceland and I d say especially Americans need to understand is that even Christians in Iceland and for that matter in most of Europe don t literally believe in the origin story in the Bible in anything but trivial numbers. Maintaining the literal interpretation of that is very much an American evangelical thing. I bet if you polled priests in Iceland and asked them whether they thought the Big Bang happened you d get a 100% response rate in the affirmative.It s a fair point. In America, we often assume  religious  to mean  creationist  because so much of our religious discourse is consumed by conservative fundamentalists. Waking up to the fact that other countries and other churches don t have to be Bible literalists to still believe in God can be jarring for some. As part of a television show, an American religious conservative flew to Scandinavia to learn about how those countries worship. When he discovered how secular people were, and how even the church embraced things like science and same-sex marriage, his brain almost couldn t handle it.[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuDqEGlKOus]Meanwhile, back in America, the country remains an outlier in the Western world. Thanks to conservative lawmakers that work to undermine education and special interest groups that push religion into schools, American students still struggle to accept well-supported scientific theories like evolution or the big bang. Slowly, that appears to be changing. Recently, the United States had a bittersweet moment when new polls found a majority of the American public (finally) accepted evolution over Creationism. We still have a long way to go to reach Iceland s numbers though.Feature image via Wikimedia