Evolution denial correlates with anthropogenic climate change denial

[Jonathan_Burke (Jon)]

Relevant to the recent discussion about whether or not Christians who reject evolution are “anti-science”, it’s worth noting the correlation between rejection of evolution and rejection of anthropogenic climate change denial. This suggests some kind of resistance to science in broader terms, not simply to evolution.

[Mervin_Bitikofer]

I’m surprised that the tiny ‘Anabaptist’ circle rated so far down on both axes, but maybe I have considerable bias since the Mennonite Church I attend is in a university town, giving us a more liberal membership than many others (but not so many others as there would have been still in rural areas a few decades ago.) Still, folks like the Amish should be higher than nearly everyone else on the environmental care scale.

The ‘support for evolution’ axis probably didn’t differentiate between those who give it zero support just because they never think about it … a non-issue, versus thinking about it quite a bit and being actively against it. So it is unclear from the graph labels alone what “zero” means.

[Argon]

With that data, it’s hard to disentangle political affiliation (multidimensional), and other socioeconomic factors. Many of the groups listed would correlate similarly with other factors.

Level of education does not appear to be a large predictor of opinions on climate change for the US. In other countries there is a stronger correlation.

[Jonathan_Burke (Jon)]

@Argon

With that data, it’s hard to disentangle political affiliation (multidimensional), and other socioeconomic factors. Many of the groups listed would correlate similarly with other factors.

The article addresses this to some extent. There’s some good analysis in the article of what the data indicates.

Obviously, it is important to emphasize that a given individual, of any faith, could be anywhere on the chart above — it’s just that this is where the denominations as a whole seemed to fall out, based on Rosenau’s analysis (which itself mirrors prior analyses of the political alignments of U.S. faiths and denominations by political scientist and Religion News Service blogger Tobin Grant).