Chalk one up for stereotypes.
That caricature of the neighborly, cheerful Mormon is upheld by a recent Pew Research Center survey on religion in America. Likewise, the typecast angry atheist looms large in Pew’s numbers.
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When gauged on their warmth toward other religious groups, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gave the most positive ratings. Atheists gave, by far, the most negative ratings.
Atheists had strongly negative views of every other group except Jews, toward whom atheists were moderately positive. What’s more, atheists harbor far more negative opinions of evangelical Christians and Catholics than evangelicals and Catholics harbor toward atheists. Most strikingly, atheists have overwhelmingly negative feelings toward Mormons, while Mormons have net positive feelings toward atheists.
Then again, all religious groups except for Catholics had, on net, negative feelings toward Mormons — though nobody was as anti-Mormon as the atheists.
The other most interesting finding was that everyone seemed to love the Jews. Every group had a net positive attitude toward Jews, who are often typically the most-targeted group in hate crimes in the United States. The single highest net approval in the whole survey was the Mormons’ plus-58-percentage-point approval of Jews.
The single greatest net negative was the atheists’ minus-76-point rating of evangelicals.
If we return to that first finding (that atheists don’t really like people and Mormons do), we see an interesting correlation with family formation. The religious group in the U.S. with the highest birth rate is the Mormons, and the group with the fewest babies is the atheists.
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This points us toward an underdiscussed cause of falling birthrates in the U.S. and in Europe: not that we have too many atheists, but that we have too many of us who don’t believe in the good of humanity. If you didn’t think people were good, why would you generate more of them?
And the numbers all suggest that the more time you spend thinking about God, the fonder you are of his greatest creations.
