Mormon Beliefs On Evolution
Looking at Pew Religious Landscape Data
Introduction
This last week, I read a paper about Mormon beliefs on evolution. Using Pew Religious Landscape data from 2007, the authors claimed that Mormons are similar to Evangelical Protestants and are one of the demographic groups most likely to reject human evolution.
In 2014, Pew released another survey with data on religion and evolution. So, lets to a look at the more recent data.
Charts
If you are interested in the 2007 data, I encourage you to read the article. Their figures are informative and easy to understand. Because the questions on evolution are different from 2007 and 2014 in the Pew Religious Landscape study, I do not compare them in my analysis, but just look at breaks in the new question.
Firstly, let’s look at a break of the evolution question across religion.
Consistent with the findings in the research paper, we see that - while not as far as Evangelical Protestants or Jehovah Witness traditions - Mormon are among the most likely groups to reject evolution.
My first thought was to look at a break in education. Perhaps those who have attended more formal schooling would be more more likely to believe in human evolution. While an education trend existed in the US (more educated → more likely to believe in evolution), I didn’t find the same for Mormons. It was, in fact, there wasn’t much difference among those with a bachelors or higher and those without a bachelors.
When looking at this break, I saw that the Mormons who attended “some college“ were more likely to say they did not believe in human evolution compared with other groups. From a previous post, I know that the “some college“ group among Mormons is female dominated (post linked below). So, I decided to look at a gender break.
Sure enough, females were less likely to believe in human evolution. Do note that this data is from 2014 (so almost 10 years ago!) I suspect that we are seeing this gender break because historically there has been a larger gender gap (women feeling and acting more religious than men) and those with higher religiosity are perhaps more likely to reject human evolution1. Though if you are a regular reader, you would also know that we are seeing evidence that this gender gap is disappearing in recent years among Mormons and the US overall (link to post below).
So, I would be very keen to see this question asked again in a survey today. I would suspect that this gender gap may have disappeared.
In the research article I linked above, the authors found a relationship between political party and belief in human evolution. So, let’s look at that break.
Sure enough, we confirmed another finding which is political party matters for belief in human evolution among Mormons.
I’ll show one last chart of something I found interesting…
Note that the total sample size for Mormons is 664. There are just over 300 respondents for each gender among Mormons and only 36 of the 300+ mormon females identify as a democrat, so we clearly have to interpret this with caution.
When we look at the Gender X Party break among Mormons, we see something fascinating in Mormon women.
Mormon Women who identify as Democrats are the most likely group to believe in human evolution - more likely than all breaks of men; however, Mormon Women identifying as Republicans are the least likely group to believe in human evolution. These are very stark differences! Male Mormons don’t see nearly the range that Female Mormons do when broken down by party.
Let me know if you have any thoughts or questions in the comments.
See you next week!
Confirmed this by looking at Pew RLS data, though I did not make a chart. People who have higher religiosity are more likely to say they reject human evolution in the US generally (and also among Mormons only).