Surprise: 56% of US Catholics Favor Legalized Abortion

Dalia Fahmy

Pew Research Center

Originally posted 20 Oct 20

Here are two excerpts:

1. More than half of U.S. Catholics (56%) said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while roughly four-in-ten (42%) said it should be illegal in all or most cases, according to the 2019 Pew Research Center survey. Although most Catholics generally approve of legalized abortion, the vast majority favor at least some restrictions. For example, while roughly one-third of Catholics (35%) said abortion should be legal in most cases, only around one-fifth (21%) said it should be legal in all cases. By the same token, 28% of Catholics said abortion should be illegal in most cases, while half as many (14%) said it should be illegal in all cases.

Compared with other Christian groups analyzed in the data, Catholics were about as likely as White Protestants who are not evangelical (60%) and Black Protestants (64%) to support legal abortion, and much more likely than White evangelical Protestants (20%) to do so. Among Americans who are religiously unaffiliated – those who say they are atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” – the vast majority (83%) said abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

(cut)

6. Even though most Catholics said abortion should generally be legal, a majority also said abortion is morally wrong. In fact, the share who said that abortion is morally wrong (57%), according to data from a 2017 survey, and the share who said it should be legal (56%) are almost identical. Among adults in other religious groups, there was a wide range of opinions on this question: Almost two-thirds of Protestants (64%) said abortion is morally wrong, including 77% of those who identify with evangelical Protestant denominations. Among the religiously unaffiliated, the vast majority said abortion is morally acceptable (34%) or not a moral issue (42%).

The info is here.

Nurses Continue to Rate Highest in Honesty, Ethics

RJ Reinhart
news.gallup.com
Originally posted 6 Jan 20

For the 18th year in a row, Americans rate the honesty and ethics of nurses highest among a list of professions that Gallup asks U.S. adults to assess annually. Currently, 85% of Americans say nurses' honesty and ethical standards are "very high" or "high," essentially unchanged from the 84% who said the same in 2018. Alternatively, Americans hold car salespeople in the lowest esteem, with 9% saying individuals in this field have high levels of ethics and honesty, similar to the 8% who said the same in 2018.

Nurses are consistently rated higher in honesty and ethics than all other professions that Gallup asks about, by a wide margin. Medical professions in general rate highly in Americans' assessments of honesty and ethics, with at least six in 10 U.S. adults saying medical doctors, pharmacists and dentists have high levels of these virtues. The only nonmedical profession that Americans now hold in a similar level of esteem is engineers, with 66% saying individuals in this field have high levels of honesty and ethics.

Americans' high regard for healthcare professionals contrasts sharply with their assessments of stockbrokers, advertising professionals, insurance salespeople, senators, members of Congress and car salespeople -- all of which garner less than 20% of U.S. adults saying they have high levels of honesty and ethics.

The public's low levels of belief in the honesty and ethical standards of senators and members of Congress may be a contributing factor in poor job approval ratings for the legislature. No more than 30% of Americans have approved of Congress in the past 10 years.

The info is here.

Social physics

Despite the vagaries of free will and circumstance, human behaviour in bulk is far more predictable than we like to imagine

Ian Stewart
www.aeon.co
Originally posted July 9, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Polling organisations use a variety of methods to try to minimise these sources of error. Many of these methods are mathematical, but psychological and other factors also come into consideration. Most of us know of stories where polls have confidently indicated the wrong result, and it seems to be happening more often. Special factors are sometimes invoked to ‘explain’ why, such as a sudden late swing in opinion, or people deliberately lying to make the opposition think it’s going to win and become complacent. Nevertheless, when performed competently, polling has a fairly good track-record overall. It provides a useful tool for reducing uncertainty. Exit polls, where people are asked whom they voted for soon after they cast their vote, are often very accurate, giving the correct result long before the official vote count reveals it, and can’t influence the result.

Today, the term ‘social physics’ has acquired a less metaphorical meaning. Rapid progress in information technology has led to the ‘big data’ revolution, in which gigantic quantities of information can be obtained and processed. Patterns of human behaviour can be extracted from records of credit-card purchases, telephone calls and emails. Words suddenly becoming more common on social media, such as ‘demagogue’ during the 2016 US presidential election, can be clues to hot political issues.

The mathematical challenge is to find effective ways to extract meaningful patterns from masses of unstructured information, and many new methods.

The info is here.

Americans' trust in honesty, ethics of clergy hits all-time low in Gallup ranking of professions

Stoyan Zaimov
www.christianpost.com
Originally posted December 25, 2018

Americans' view of the honesty and ethics of clergy has fallen to an all-time low in a ranking of different professions released by Gallup.

The Gallup poll, conducted between Dec. 3-12 of 1,025 U.S. adults, found that only 37 percent of respondents had a "very high" or "high” opinion of the honesty and ethical standards of clergy. Forty-three percent of people gave them an average rating, while 15 percent said they had a “low” or “very low” opinion, according to the poll that was released on Dec. 21.

The margin of sampling error for the survey was identified as plus or minus 4 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.

Gallup noted that the 37 percent "very high" or "high" score for clergy is the lowest since it began asking the question in 1977. The historical high of 67 percent occurred back in 1985, and the score has been dropping below the overall average positive rating of 54 percent since 2009.

"The public's views of the honesty and ethics of the clergy continue to decline after the Catholic Church was rocked again this year by more abuse scandals,” Gallup noted in its observations.

The info is here.

West Virginia Poll examines moral and social issues

Brad McElhinny
wvmetronews.com
Originally posted September 30, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Role of God in morality

There was a 50-50 split in a question asking respondents to select the statement that best reflects their view of the role of God in morality.

Half responded, “It is not necessary to believe in God in order to be moral and have good values.”

The other half of respondents chose the option “It is necessary to believe in God in order to be moral and have good values.”

“The two big, significant differences are younger people and self-identified conservatives who have opposite points of view on this question,” said professional pollster Rex Repass, the author of the West Virginia Poll.

Of younger people — those between ages 18 and 34 — 60 percent said it’s not necessary to believe in God to have good moral and ethical values.

That compared to 35 percent of those ages 55-64 who answered with that statement.

“So generally, if you’re under 35, you’re more likely to say it’s not necessary to say have a higher being in your life to have good values,” Repass said.

“If you’re older that percentage increases. You’re more likely to believe you have to have God in your life to be moral and have good values.”

Of respondents who labeled themselves as conservative, 73 percent said it is necessary to believe in God to have moral values.

The info is here.

About Half of Americans Say U.S. Moral Values Are 'Poor’

Justin McCarthy
Gallup.com
Originally published June 1, 2018

Forty-nine percent of Americans say the state of moral values in the U.S. is "poor" -- the highest percentage in Gallup's trend on this measure since its inception in 2002. Meanwhile, 37% of U.S. adults say moral values are "only fair," and 14% say they are "excellent" or "good."

Americans have always viewed the state of U.S. morals more negatively than positively. But the latest figures are the worst to date, with a record-high 49% rating values as poor and a record-tying-low 14% rating them as excellent or good.

In earlier polls on the measure, Americans were about as likely to rate the country's moral standing as only fair as they were to say it was poor. But in 10 of the past 12 annual polls since 2007, Americans have been decidedly more likely to rate it as poor.

The information is here.

Would You Opt for Immortality?

Michael Shermer
Quillette
Originally posted March 2, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

The idea of living forever, in fact, is not such a radical idea when you consider the fact that the vast majority of people already believe that they will do so in the next life. Since the late 1990s Gallup has consistently found that between 72 and 83 percent of Americans believe in heaven. Globally, rates of belief in heaven in other countries typically lag behind those found in America, but they are nonetheless robust. A 2011 Ipsos/Reuters poll, for example, found that of 18,829 people surveyed across 23 countries,2 51 percent said they were convinced that an afterlife exists, ranging from a high of 62 percent of Indonesians and 52 percent of South Africans and Turks, to a low of 28 percent of Brazilians and only 3 percent of the very secular Swedes.

So powerful and pervasive are such convictions that even a third of agnostics and atheists proclaim belief in an afterlife. Say what? A 2014 survey conducted by the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture on 15,738 Americans between the ages of 18 and 60 found that 13.2 percent identify as atheist or agnostic, and 32 percent of those answered in the affirmative to the question: “Do you think there is life, or some sort of conscious existence, after death?”

Depending on what these people believe about what, exactly, is resurrected in the next life—just your soul, or both your body and your soul—the belief among religious people that “you” will continue indefinitely in some form in the hereafter is not so different in principle from what the scientific immortalists are trying to accomplish in the here and now.

The article is here.

The Moral Fabric and Social Norms

AEI Political Report
Volume 14, Issue 1
January 2018

A large majority now, as in the past, say moral values in the country are getting worse. Social conservatives, moderates, and liberals agree. At the same time, however, as these pages show, people accept some behaviors once thought wrong. Later in this issue, we look at polls on women’s experiences with sexual harassment, a topic which has drawn public scrutiny following recent allegations of misconduct against high profile individuals.

Q: Right now, do you think . . . ?

The rest of the statistics and information is here.

A growing share of Americans say it’s not necessary to believe in God to be moral

Gregory A. Smith
Pew Research Center
Originally published October 16, 2017

Most U.S. adults now say it is not necessary to believe in God to be moral and have good values (56%), up from about half (49%) who expressed this view in 2011. This increase reflects the continued growth in the share of the population that has no religious affiliation, but it also is the result of changing attitudes among those who do identify with a religion, including white evangelical Protestants.

Surveys have long shown that religious “nones” – those who describe themselves religiously as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” – are more likely than those who identify with a religion to say that belief in God is not a prerequisite for good values and morality. So the public’s increased rejection of the idea that belief in God is necessary for morality is due, in large part, to the spike in the share of Americans who are religious “nones.”

Indeed, the growth in the share of Americans who say belief in God is unnecessary for morality tracks closely with the growth in the share of the population that is religiously unaffiliated. In the 2011 Pew Research Center survey that included the question about God and morality, religious “nones” constituted 18% of the sample. By 2017, the share of “nones” stood at 25%.

The information is here.

Views of US Moral Values Slip to Seven-Year Lows

Gallup
Originally posted May 22, 2017

Americans' ratings of U.S. moral values, consistently negative through the years, have slipped to their lowest point in seven years. More than four in five (81%) now rate the state of moral values in the U.S. as only fair or poor.

Since Gallup first asked in 2002 whether the nation's moral values were getting better or getting worse, the percentage saying worse has always been well above the majority level, ranging from a low of 64% in November 2004 to a high of 82% in May 2007. Over the past six years, it has stayed within a five-point range, reaching a low of 72% in 2013 and 2015 before climbing to this year's high of 77%.

Gallup's question about the current state of moral values getting better or worse has been asked over the same 16-year span as the question about the overall state of moral values. The combined percentage saying moral values are only fair or poor through the years has generally aligned with views about moral values getting worse.

The article is here.

Americans Rate Healthcare Providers High on Honesty, Ethics

Jim Normal
Gallup.com
Originally posted December 2016

Most Americans trust their healthcare providers to be honest and ethical, but few other professions fare so well in Gallup's annual look at honesty and ethical standards among various fields. Nurses top the list with 84% of the public rating their standards as "high" or "very high," while members of Congress fall to the bottom -- the only profession for which a majority of Americans (59%) rate honesty and ethical standards as "low" or "very low."

(cut)

Further, for the fourth year in a row -- in a nation where religion is an important part of life for three-fourths of the population -- less than half of Americans think religious leaders have high ethical standards. Meanwhile, two groups of professionals linked to the bitter political battles of 2016 -- college teachers and journalists -- are at or near their all-time lows, with views split along partisan lines.

The article is here.

“Nones” on the Rise

Pew Research
Religion and Public Life Project
Originally published October 9, 2012

Here are some excerpts:

The growth in the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans – sometimes called the rise of the “nones” – is largely driven by generational replacement, the gradual supplanting of older generations by newer ones.4 A third of adults under 30 have no religious affiliation (32%), compared with just one-in-ten who are 65 and older (9%). And young adults today are much more likely to be unaffiliated than previous generations were at a similar stage in their lives.

(cut)

The unaffiliated also are not uniformly hostile toward religious institutions. They are much more likely than the public overall to say that churches and other religious organizations are too concerned with money and power, too focused on rules, and too involved in politics.

The entire report is here.

Architect Of Health Law Says Reform Is 'Never Finished'

The University of New Orleans
Originally published May 7, 2014

Two polls released this week reveal challenges ahead for the Affordable Care Act.

Gallup found the nation’s uninsured rate dropped to 13.4 percent last month, the lowest monthly uninsured rate since the company began tracking it in 2008. But that means 32 million people remain without coverage.

And a Pew Research Center poll shows that 55 percent of Americans disapprove of the 2010 health care reform law, which mandates that everyone have health insurance and that it be made available to even those with pre-existing medical conditions.

The entire story is here.