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Religion, Politics, and Americans’ Confidence in Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 August 2016

Darren E. Sherkat
Darren E. Sherkat*
Affiliation:
Southern Illinois University
*
Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Darren E. Sherkat, Department of Sociology, Southern Illinois University, Faner Hall 3384, Mail Code 4524, 1000 Faner Drive, Carbondale, IL 62901. E-mail: sherkat@siu.edu.
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Abstract

Americans’ perceptions of science are structured by overlapping cultural fields of politics and religion, and those cultural fields vary over time in how they influence opinion about science. This paper provides a historical narrative for understanding how religious and political factors influence public perceptions of science over the last four decades. Using data from the 1974–2012 General Social Survey, the impact of religious and political factors are examined and compared across decades using heterogeneous ordinal logistic regression models and ordinal structural equation models. Estimates show that the impact of sectarian Protestant identification and fundamentalist beliefs in the Bible are increasingly linked to lower levels of confidence in science, and that these religious factors also influence the impact of political conservatism and Republican Party identification. Political conservatism has become more oppositional towards science, and Republicans have become less enthusiastic compared to periods when science was primarily linked to militaristic endeavors.

Type
Articles
Information
Politics and Religion , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , March 2017 , pp. 137 - 160
Copyright
Copyright © Religion and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association 2016 

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Footnotes

A version of this paper was presented at the 2014 annual meetings of the Southern Sociological Society, Charlotte, NC. Comments from anonymous reviewers and Paul Djupe were helpful for improving this work.

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