Who Do Mormons Marry?
Examining Mormon Political, Racial, & Religious Cohesion in Marriage
Introduction
When I was looking through the AEI survey last week, I saw they have a few questions asking specifically about the marital partner. With this information, we can explore who Mormons marry! Do they marry those of the same political party? Same race? Same religion? How does the Mormon rates compare to the US nationally and to other religions?
Charts
We’ll look at data from 3 different questions asking about 3 qualities of the spouse:
Race
Religion
Political Party
It may come as no surprise that Mormons are more likely to marry those of the same religion. Americans typically marry those of the same religion, but Mormons are more likely to.
Looking at the Mormon data on the three factors, Mormons are actually equally likely to marry someone of the same race and of the same religion. 83% of Mormons are married to someone of the same race.
At first glance, this may seem high. But remember, Mormons (in the US) have much lower racial diversity than the US.
And when we compare the racial sameness across religions, we see that the differences really aren’t very large.
Mormons are slightly more likely to marry someone of the same race compare to some others. But, by and large, there really isn’t much difference here across religion. If anything, given the racial makeup of the church (and commitment to marrying other Mormons) having similar “same spouse race” number to the US suggests Mormons may be more willing to have an interracial marriage. They just have a smaller pool of candidates with different races.
The last chart I’ll show is this Inter-Political marriage one. I was surprised to see Mormons being more willing to marry those of different political orientations - especially given that so many Mormons are Republicans (~60% I think).
I didn’t have time to look at this any more this week, but I’m curious if this may be driven by younger Mormon couples. It’s also close enough to the other numbers and has a low enough sample size to be a blip. It could also be identifying as a Republican or Democrat and spouse identifying as an independent.
Another thought I had while writing this is that political party and religion could change over time whereas race would likely stay the same. Not sure how this factor plays into things. I assume a married couple would become more similar over time, but maybe I'm wrong 🤷♂️ maybe old couples bicker because they have formed different opinions over time on religion and politics 😂
Curious on others thoughts if you have them.
Until next week.