Christian Nationalism & Mormonism
Looking at Survey of 6000 Americans From PRRI
Introduction
Recently, I saw a few charts around religion and Christian Nationalism. As the Mormon Metrics man, I wondered how US Mormons score on Christian Nationalism measures.
I found a publicly available survey from PRRI in 2023 with a battery of 8 or so questions measuring Christian Nationalism. There are 6000 respondents in the survey and I got 90 respondents who identify as “Mormon.“ You can read their full write-up here which was published about 2 years ago at this point. Its really interesting!
What is Christian Nationalism?
Here is a short definition courtesy of an LLM 🤖:
Christian nationalism is a political ideology that advocates for the fusion of Christian identity and values with American national identity and governance, often asserting that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation and should actively maintain this identity through its laws and policies.
I’m not going to argue one way or the other ideologically whether Latter-day Saints are Christian Nationalist. Today, we will just look at how Mormons responded to the questions on the survey.
How is Christian Nationalism measured in the survey?
In the report, they just used 5 questions, but in the survey questionnaire they asked 8 questions all related to Christian Nationalism in the same battery. We are going to look at all 8, so if you read the original PRRI report you can have something a little extra in this analysis!
Here are our questions…
For each question, the respondent was asked whether they strongly agree, mostly agree, mostly disagree, or strongly disagree with each statement.
Charts
Overall Christian Nationalism Scores By Religion
As I note in the caption of this chart, I coded the Agree to Disagree scale to numbers than I took the average - with the most christian nationalist code being 4 and the least being 1. If someone scored a 4 that means that they “strongly agreed“ with all of the Christian Nationalism statements vs. a 1 which means they “strongly disagreed“ to the statements.
As you can see, the averages in the chart above are lower in our 1 to 4 range indicating these ideas aren’t necessarily popular even among christians. Mormons rank 3rd highest, but score similar to an average Christian respondent. Statistically, we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a lot of these groups since the differences are small and the Mormon sample size is small, but this represents our best estimate of how things look. Evangelical Christians believe these ideas at a higher rate than Mormons do.
Christian Nationalism Questions Ranked By Greatest Difference From Average Christian
These are pretty fun for me because in this case from a Latter-day Saint perspective the highest and lowest scoring statements make sense.
The highest scoring statement is referencing America as the “promised land“ that is to be “an example to the rest of the world.” I can think of a few scriptures related to these ideas.
Here is this question broken out by religion:
While still not as high as Evangelical Christians, Mormons are the closest to them on this question. Over half of Mormons, Completely or Mostly agree with this statement.
Now let’s look at the lowest scoring question which also makes sense from a Latter-day Saint perspective…
Mormons score the second lowest when asked whether they agree that Christians should exercise dominion on American Society. They don’t score quite as low as Mainline Christians on this question, but there is a clear distaste for this idea with of 75% Strongly or mostly disagreeing with this statement.
This question being the lowest makes sense to me because of a certain scripture toward the end of the Doctrine and Covenants.
Conclusion
Here are the takeaways…
Of all the christian groups looked at today, Mormons scored 3rd highest on Christian Nationalism behind Evangelical Protestants and “Other“ christians. Many of the religions score closely with Evangelical Christians being #1.
Mormons deviated furthest from the average christian response (toward Christian Nationalism) on this statement: “God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world.“\
And conversely, they deviated the most from the average christian response away from Christian Nationalism on this question… “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society“
I think its important to remember that these averages are quite low. This ideology exists, but is not very prevalent. You can see this clearly in the PRRI reports only 10% of the US strongly agreeing with most of these statements and only 5% of Mormons (Mormons have many more “sympathizers“ than the US which is why they are ranked #3 among Christians).
Code is available here and the public data file is found here.