1. gnxp
  2. Northeastern Protestants & Catholics accept evolution

Northeastern Protestants & Catholics accept evolution

By razib on August 28, 2009.

On a lark I decided to see how Catholics & Protestants broke down in regards to evolution by American region in the GSS. Specifically, I clustered the Census Divisions to create the categories of:

Northeast = New England + Mid Atlantic
Midwest = E & W North Central
South = S Atlantic + E South Central + W South Central
West = Mountain + Pacific

I limited the data to non-Hispanic whites for the question "evolved," which was asked in 2006 and 2008, so recently. Results below the fold for this question....


 Protestant Catholic No Religion

Humans Beings Developed From Animals (True)
Northeast 60 66.8 90.3
Midwest 37.2 67.7 77.8
South 30.6 59 82.8
West 36.5 71.5 86.5

I assume few are surprised that Catholics accept evolution at a higher rate than Protestants, this is evident in many polls going back decades. Rather, the interesting point is that the Northeast does not exhibit much religious polarization on this question, while every other region does. The Catholic - Protestant difference for each region is:

Northeast- 6.8
Midwest - 30.5
South - 28.4
West - 35

Tags
creationism
GSS

More like this

Region & race; opinions & values
In the post below I combined some of the Census Regions for reasons of sample size. But I decided to do this again without combining, but removing some of the questions because of small sample sizes. Again, I also limited the sample to whites between 1998-2008. But, I added another category:…
Regional differences in opinion, attitude and values
Update: Follow up post. This Michael Lind piece bemoaning liberal contempt for white Southerners made me want to look a bit deeper and compare interregional differences and similarities. I went into the General Social Survey and limited responses to whites only and compared by region. The regions…
Who are the conservative Democrats? (part 2)
A question below: I'm curious about the demographics of this category, specifically their geographic distribution, religion and ethnicity. First, I limited the sample to whites to remove confounds of ethnicity. Interestingly, in the GSS in the period between 1998-2008 24% of black Democrats/lean…
Fear of a black president: Mississippi edition
The map to the left shows the counties which voted for Obama (blue) and McCain (red) in the 2008 election. The blue counties are part of the Black Belt, the area where blacks are a majority of the population because of the economic concentration of cotton culture during the 19th and 20th centuries…

Having lived in the NE and the middle of the country, I may be able to offer a partial explanation. Non-catholic christians in the Northeast have traditionally been the LESS conservative, not more conservative, groups. This has changes somewhat recently, but it was so true and so strongly true for a long time that it must have an effect.

Also, I just want to point out that the question itself represents a fallacy. Humans did not evolve from animals. The problem with the phrase is, of course, the word 'from'. See my discussion on the question of whether humans evolved from apes.