It’s a veritable pope-a-thon this week as TV and the Internet are awash in stories detailing Pope Francis’ visit to Cuba and then the United States. But it’s not all good news on the God front. Economist and journalist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is adding evidence to what polling evidence has already revealed: Americans aren’t as fascinated by things divine as we once were.
“It’s been a bad decade for God, at least so far,” he reported in Sunday’s New York Times. “Despite the rising popularity of Pope Francis, who was elected in 2013, Google searches for churches are 15 percent lower in the first half of this decade than they were during the last half of the previous one. Searches questioning God’s existence are up. Many behaviors that he supposedly abhors have skyrocketed. Porn searches are up 83 percent. For heroin, it’s 32 percent.”
The Ten Commandments aren’t doing so well, either. “Love thy neighbor” is the most common search with the word “neighbor” in it, but right behind at No. 2 is “neighbor porn,” he writes.
Stephens-Davidowitz notes that you can’t make too much of what people search for on Google. Long-term polling data is surely more accurate, and Internet Google searches are likely “biased in favor of debauched activities.”
Still, it doesn’t bode well for our collective souls to consider that in recent years, he reports, Jesus Christ has averaged about 4.7 million searches annually. Meanwhile, Kim Kardashian has averaged 49 million.