@TheMiddleWay That's over 75% of Americans, not Christians.

But this is 'Murica, where the percentage of Biblical literalists is far higher than in the rest of the developed world.

Although I do wonder if the question was literally posed that way ("Do you believe the Bible is the actual word of God, to be taken literally word for word?" ) if many respondents just said yes because in the abstract they would say yes to that but don't really believe that in any practical way. It's one of those questions where many people don't want to actually say it's bullshit, even if they think it is.

The more interesting thing here to me is that about 25% of Americans believe the Bible is literally God's word, which means that about 75% would have to be liberal Christians or "nones" (unaffiliated religious or areligious including atheists). That seems about right. On a worldwide basis 17% of Christians are evangelicals, and that figure should be higher in the US.

The last Pew survey I can find pegs evangelicals at 26.4% of the US population as of 2004; that has doubtless eroded a bit since. That same study says Catholics and Protestants together make up 38% of the populace. It's not clear whether evangelicals are included within Protestants, but since that study ways 16% of the population are Protestants and 26.4% are evangelicals, I guess not; in that study "Protestant" must mean "non-evangelical Protestants". In other words about two-thirds of protestants in the US were evangelicals. That's a little higher than I'd have thought, but it would explain a great deal.

If I'm reading the 2004 Pew numbers right, about two-thirds of Americans were then some flavor of Christian, a bit less than half were non-Catholic, and about two-thirds of those were evangelicals -- a rough proxy for fundamentalist / literalist / inerrantist / authoritarian types. That translates to 2/3 of one half or about 33% evangelical, which now apparently has degraded quite a bit if only 25% of the populace are literalist believers as of 2017. That's a pretty sharp drop in 13 years. No wonder they're running scared.

@TheMiddleWay I said 75% would inherently be some combination of liberal believers or Nones. Not that they'd all be Nones.

Regarding the worldwide numbers I've looked those up a couple of times and had them fixed in my brain but it's been quite awhile since I actually dug them up. I recall the figure of 17% of Christians are evangelicals on a worldwide basis. I'll hunt around and see if that has changed.

Edit: Okay this is another case where Pew does this weird thing of separating evangelicals from Protestants, as if they were not Protestants. Maybe it's an effort to lump conservative Catholics under that same umbrella. Also, oddly, they don't include pentecostals / charismatics under the "evangelical" label, whereas I would consider them a subset of evangelicalism. Anyway ... a 2011 Pew Forum study gave a figure of 13.1% evangelical (~285.5 million) on a worldwide basis, but as I said that leaves out some 584 million pentecostals charismatics. I infer from the wording of the study that there's overlap between the two groups, some people identify as e.g. charismatic and evangelical.

Sebastian Fath of CNRS, a French organization studying evangelicalism, claims there are 630 million evangelicals in the world as of 2017, including the charismatics. Operation World puts the number at 550 million.

Obviously these groups slice and dice things a bit differently. More here:

[en.wikipedia.org]

@Donotbelieve good point! The bible is filled with contradictions. Written by less mentally evolved humans.

@Donotbelieve They were certainly more gullible 2000 years ago. A cave dweller came up with a story and convinced the masses that it was true. All it takes is the endorsement of one ruler, however big or small, to legitimize a claim