Are Latter-day Saints Afraid To Die?
Quick Chart From the Chapman Survey of American Fears
Introduction
I was reading a post from Ryan Burge here a few weeks ago exploring the fear of death by religious denomination and other demographics that I really enjoyed. I wondered if LDS data was available in the dataset, so we could zoom in closer there. Sure enough, with recoding and cleaning, there were 90 Latter-day Saint respondents across 5 waves of the Chapman American Fears survey and a total US sample of 6,016. So, perhaps you can think of this as a complement to Ryan’s post.
Because of the amount of time it takes to go through each survey individually and clean the data, I only include 1 chart today showing an overall breakdown, but if I find other interesting questions asked across waves, I may include more exploration of this dataset in the future.
Chart
Latter-day Saints scored similarly to Protestants in their fear of death which is on the lower end. I interpret this as a good news signal for Latter-day Saints as the doctrine on the Plan of Salvation may quell fears that might otherwise exist and perhaps does so at higher rates in other religions. The No Religion group being more afraid didn’t particularly surprise me as they may not believe in an afterlife, but the Catholics being our most afraid group did. I am not terribly familiar with Catholic theology, but perhaps one of my readers can shed some light on this point who might know more than me.
Let me know if you have any thoughts to share below.
See you next week.
Code available here. Data downloadable here. Read more about the survey and methodology here.
I think being dead is a lot of work for a Catholic. Forgive me if I am wrong Catholics. I’m not sure many people are considered worthy to go straight to heaven. Instead, they have to work their way out of purgatory. And there’s always a threat of hell.
Sometimes it takes some tedious work to get to the really interesting answers. Thanks for doing this! I'd be curious to know if the similarities are the same for LDS and the broader Protestant population across age ranges. Is there any reason to think they wouldn't be? Also, I can attribute fear of dying among young people as fear of missing out on all this amazing world has to offer, versus fear of the afterlife. I think those are entirely different questions.