Andy Larsen: How do Latter-day Saints compare to members of other religions? Examining 8 categories of member data.

Over the past few days, I’ve been digging into the work of a guy named Ryan Burge.

Like me, he works in multiple fields simultaneously: He’s an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and a pastor in the American Baptist Church. Unlike me, he’s a repeatedly published author (in both book and published scientific research form), has been featured in a million press outlets, and “60 Minutes” called him “one of the leading data analysts on religion and politics” in America. Checkmate to Ryan.

But we do have one further shared interest: an appreciation for good visualization. At his website, Graphs About Religion, as well as on his Twitter feed, he posts, well, graphs about religion.

While many of those graphs don’t involve Utah’s predominant religion (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) due to sample size issues or other polling limitations, many of them do. And in this article, I thought I’d compile some of his most interesting work about the Salt Lake City-based faith and its characteristics. How does the church compare to others around the country? Is there something unique about its adherents?

Let’s check out the data.

1. LDS views on political affiliation

Let’s begin by looking at the political data — Burge’s specialty. Where do Latter-day Saints stand on the political spectrum?

(Note that the word “Mormons” may be used in these graphics, typically when the poll involved asked participants about their religious affiliation using that term. The church, though, has asked that their adherents not be referred to by that term.)

You can see the huge difference in the political views of young Latter-day Saints compared to older ones; they’re way more likely to be Democrats. I figured there’d also be an increase in self-described independents, but you really just don’t see that in the data. They’re pretty consistently represented as just a small percentage of the church throughout.

I also liked the way Burge crafted this graph to show just how much more leftward young Latter-day Saints put themselves compared to the Republican Party.

Older Latter-day Saints tend to average their views right around the rest of the Republican Party and pretty close to Donald Trump’s. Younger Latter-day Saints are much more in the middle.

Overall, though, Latter-day Saints still consider the Democratic Party more extremist than nearly any other religious group, while considering the Republican Party more “middle of the road.”

2. LDS habits with TV viewership

But what do Latter-day Saints watch on TV?

Most frequently, Fox News. Some 54% of responding Latter-day Saints said they watched the channel in the past 24 hours, a truly astonishing statistic. That ranks them third, behind white evangelical and Orthodox traditions as the most likely to watch the network. Latter-day Saints are also among the least likely to watch CNN or MSNBC.

Note, though, that this doesn’t mean to expect a large Latter-day Saint influence on Fox News. Despite the high viewership numbers, they make up just 1% of Fox News’ overall audience.

What’s the second-most watched TV network for Latter-day Saints? CBS and NBC come neck and neck, with over a third choosing to watch them in the past 24 hours. Interestingly, Latter-day Saints were the largest religious group choosing “other” in the past 24 hours — meaning that they watched another network besides the seven listed here.

3. LDS views on guns

Like their white, evangelical, Fox News-watching counterparts, Latter-day Saints tend to own guns. Fully 52% of Latter-day Saints in the 2022 Cooperative Election Study said they owned a gun.

While about 85% of Latter-day Saints support background checks on gun purchases, a majority wouldn’t support banning assault rifles. That puts them at odds with Americans overall, the majority of whom supported banning assault rifles by a 63% to 36% margin.

Finally, a whopping 66% of Latter-day Saints also believed that teachers should be allowed to carry guns in schools. Once again, that makes them the second most likely religious tradition to support that concept.

4. LDS views on racial issues

But perhaps some of Fox News’ most controversial recent impacts on race relations have been less likely to impact the thinking of Latter-day Saints. In 2016, Latter-day Saints were most likely to believe that “racial problems in the U.S. are rare, isolated situations.” When asked the same question in 2020, they were the fourth most likely.

A whole examination of the trend of Latter-day Saints’ belief in systemic or at least non-rare racism goes well beyond the scope of this column. But I was also interested to see the position religious members took on agreeing or disagreeing with the statement: “I prefer my close relative marry spouses from the same race.”

I’ll be honest, I’m stunned at how many people across a wide variety of faiths will agree with that statement in a survey. Maybe it’s just my values. But to me, having preferences in the racial composition of a family member’s partner seems like a form of extremely clear-cut, unacceptable racism.

Comparatively, though, Latter-day Saints don’t share that value more than other religious groups — though the numbers still seem high to me.

5. LDS views on transgender rights

A short category: a majority of Latter-day Saints support the right for transgender people to serve in the military, though they are the second-most likely religious group to oppose their entrance into service.

Overall, 35% of Americans in November 2020 supported banning transgender people from military service, while 60% of white evangelicals and 46% of Latter-day Saints favored a ban.

6. LDS influence in U.S. Congress

This is the only paragraph in this article not made by Burge, but I found it interesting and related to the rest of the data: The number of Latter-day Saints in Congress is at a relatively low point.

From at least 2009 to 2020, double-digit numbers of congressional members told the Pew Research Center they were Mormon — and the same was true in 1969, 1979, 1989 and 1999,. Now, though, Congress is down to nine Latter-day Saint respondents. The recent retirements or political defeats of Sens. Tom Udall, D-N.M.; Jeff Flake, R-Ariz.; and Dean Heller, R-Nev., pushed the list down to nine. Now, it’s Utah’s six-man political contingent, plus Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho; and Reps. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, and Andy Biggs, R-Ariz.

7. LDS household income and views on minimum wage

OK, let’s leave the political sphere. How about household income by religion? Be warned: There are a lot of religious groups dissected in the graph below.

In the end, Latter-day Saint households have a pretty middle-of-the-road household income. As some commenters on the post noted, that may well be due to the higher tendency of Latter-day Saints to have one-income households rather than two incomes.

Latter-day Saints are, though, more unlikely to support raising the minimum wage than any other religion.

While those Latter-day Saints whose households make less than $70,000 tend to support the notion of raising the minimum wage to $15 — as do roughly two-thirds of Americans, more wealthy Latter-day Saint households would prefer not to do so.

8. LDS church attendance

How many Latter-day Saints regularly attend church?

Again, there’s a lot of sects in that list. But among all of them, Latter-day Saints are third-most likely to attend church weekly. There’s a lot of worry in the Latter-day Saint (and former Latter-day Saints) community about members who don’t attend often or at all — well, a lot of religions have that problem, and most of them, worse than Latter-day Saints.

Latter-day Saints are also among the youngest average church attendees. Like nearly every sect, the average age of church attendees has significantly risen in the past decade-plus.

Overall, I find this stuff fascinating, and many thanks to Burge for doing such interesting research. I swear this article isn’t an ad for his site. But if you’re like me and enjoyed this information, it’d only be right to check out GraphsAboutReligion.com.

As for the larger trends at play here, it’ll be interesting how an emerging adult group of young Latter-day Saints that is less Republican, but still relatively frequent in church attendance, acts to change the church and its adherents’ views overall. In these graphs, many categories of Latter-day Saints are near the right-most edge of American religions, but that could be shifting. That being said, perhaps church members will simply shift more toward the views of their parents as time passes. Time will have to tell.

Andy Larsen is a data columnist for The Salt Lake Tribune. You can reach him at alarsen@sltrib.com

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