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Evidence · Case 05 · Relativism

Barna Group, “The End of Absolutes: America’s New Moral Code”

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In this national survey, most American adults did not affirm absolute moral truth. 44% said moral truth depends on the circumstances, and another 21% said they had not thought much about it. That leaves only about a third holding to fixed moral truth. Barna is a Christian research firm, so its question wording leans toward its own concerns, but the basic split matches other polling.

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Barna is an evangelical polling firm selling to churches worried about decline. Its question wording is loaded, and people who say morality depends on the situation usually mean ordinary nuance, not that nothing is objectively wrong.

Both criticisms have force, and Barna’s framing should be read with care. Absolute is a philosophically loaded word that many moral realists reject while still holding that morality is objective, and moral truth depends on circumstances is something a robust realist can affirm, since circumstances change which act is right. So surveys of this kind overstate relativism. Neutral sources (Pew, the World Values Survey) replicate the broad finding that a large share of Americans reject absolute morality, but not the exact percentages. The weight of this claim rests less on any survey than on the interview data, where people said in their own words that they had no basis for calling anything wrong.

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