Creationism Isn’t as Common as You Think

What Pew data reveal about age, gender, religion, and politics

There’s a concept that comes up again and again in interviews about my new book The Vanishing Church — zeitgeist. It’s often translated as “the spirit of the times,” but for folks on the internet it’s more commonly described using the word “vibes.” It just means what’s cool, relevant, or worth talking about right now. Often, the most visible form of zeitgeist is fashion. If I quickly thumb through my high school yearbook, it’s just one cringey outfit after another (many of them worn by me). I mean, I used a type of gel that took two rounds of vigorous shampooing to actually get out of my hair. What were we even doing in the late 1990s?

I was clearly responding to the zeitgeist of the time, which was apparently crying out for very crunchy hair. But the zeitgeist is more than just cargo shorts and Tamagotchi pets. It’s also about which ideas we think are worthy of debating ad nauseam. American religion is certainly not immune to the spirit of the times, and when I was growing up in a Southern Baptist church, one of the topics that seemed to be endlessly debated was evolution versus creationism.

For those unfamiliar with the contours of this debate, let me describe it this way: to believe that human beings evolved from other, inferior species of life would be to reject everything that the Bible has to say about basically everything else. The reason? Because you are turning away from literally the first chapter of the first book of the Bible, where the scriptures state, “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them.”

So if you toss out the literal creation story, you are headed down a slippery slope that could lead one to question other parts of the Bible, like the parting of the Red Sea, Jonah and the whale, or, most grievously, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And if you start to reject the Easter story, then you are essentially no longer a Christian.

But what’s interesting about that whole line of argumentation is that I really haven’t heard it much recently. In fact, I just don’t see creation versus evolution being discussed that much at all on really any social media platform. So when I was scrolling through the codebook for the Pew Religious Landscape Survey, I was struck by the inclusion of this question: “Which statement about the development of human life on Earth comes closest to your view?”

There were three response options.

1. Humans have evolved over time due to processes such as natural selection; God or a higher power had no role in this process. (I call this the “pure evolution” response).

2. Humans have evolved over time due to processes that were guided or allowed by God or a higher power. (I call this intelligent design).

3. Humans have existed in their present form since the beginning of time. (I call this the creationist view).

Here’s how the full sample of nearly 37,000 respondents answered that question.

The plurality response was the middle path—the idea that evolution is a very real thing, but that it was guided by God’s hand. This accounted for just under half of the sample (48%). The next most popular response was a belief in pure evolution. One-third of respondents said that God had no role in the evolutionary process. If you include the “don’t know” responses, that’s well over 80% of all answers.

That means the share of Americans who espouse a purely creationist view is just 17%. I know that words can often be subjective, but I think it’s fair to say that a position held by fewer than one in five Americans could reasonably be described as “a small minority.” This is why I love statistics, by the way, because they get us much closer to an objective answer to a question like: What share of Americans completely reject evolution?

So, let’s peel this back one more layer and look at responses to that same question, this time broken down by the religious tradition of the respondent.

I sorted the columns so that the groups with the highest percentage of creationist views are at the top and those most likely to reject creationism are at the bottom. There were only two groups in the sample where creationism comprised at least 20% of respondents: evangelicals at 26% and Orthodox Christians at 23%. When I say that creationism is a minority view, I mean that it’s not even a significant share of evangelicals. That’s something to keep in mind when one of these debates tends to pop up.

Which groups are most likely to reject creationism? Well, the non-religious were pretty easy to guess, right? Two-thirds of them take the “pure evolution” stance, and just 11% say that they believe in creationism. But what really struck me was that Jews and the nones had almost exactly the same distribution of responses to this question.

I also feel like I have to mention how few Catholics and mainline Protestants embrace creationism. Among Catholics, it was just 17%, and for mainliners it was even lower—13%. But note that a majority of both groups embraced intelligent design. Fewer than a quarter of either group believes in “pure evolution.”

Let me throw an age variable into the mix now. Because some of these samples weren’t that large to begin with, I had to collapse age into three categories based on decade of birth.

What really jumped off the screen when I made this graph was how little age really mattered within many of these traditions. I guess I had assumed that creationism was a viewpoint embraced primarily by older folks and that it was falling out of favor with younger adults, but often the differences across birth cohorts were incredibly modest.

Among evangelicals, there was just a four-point difference from the oldest to the youngest. For mainliners, it was six percentage points, and for Catholics it was only five points as well. There are a couple of outliers here and there (Black Protestants and Orthodox Christians), but beyond that, generations just don’t seem to matter that much.

I also want to make this point plain: it’s essentially impossible to find a subgroup where a majority take a creationist view on this topic. I mean, look at evangelical Protestants who were born before 1970. If there were a group that tended to take a more literalist view of the Bible, this would be it, right? Even among them, only 28% are creationists, while about two-thirds believe in intelligent design.

There are, of course, a whole lot of factors that could lead someone to embrace creationism. I could spend all day making graphs of different variables like age, race, gender, religious devotion, and so on. Instead, here’s what I did: I pulled together a regression analysis to determine what factors increase the likelihood of holding a creationist view. The model predicts whether someone holds a creationist view while simultaneously accounting for age, race, gender, religious practice and belief, and political partisanship. In other words, it allows us to see which factors matter most after holding the others constant.

Let’s stick with the topic of age, since that was discussed in the prior analysis. Here’s the impact that age has on a creationist viewpoint after controlling for a whole range of demographic, political, and religious factors.

The model predicts that older Americans are more likely to be creationists compared to their children and grandchildren. Among those born before 1950, about 27% are predicted to hold a creationist view. That percentage declines in a fairly consistent way across successive birth cohorts: for those born in the 1970s, the model predicts that about 24% are creationists, while among respondents born in 1980 or later the predicted probability falls to roughly 21%.

It’s important to pay attention to the error bars for these estimates, which often overlap with adjacent cohorts. Still, we can say with some confidence that younger adults are less likely to be creationists than older ones—even after accounting for differences in religious practice, belief, and political identity across generations. The decline isn’t dramatic (on the order of five percentage points), but it is consistent.

When I was building this model, the first thing I did was run the regression with just demographic variables. That can give us a sense of how things like race and gender play a role in predicting a creationist viewpoint before adding factors like church attendance, which can overwhelm demographic effects. In the first model, gender really popped off the screen. Women were noticeably more likely to hold creationist views compared to men.

I initially thought that this finding would “wash out” when I threw in a bunch of variables related to religion and politics. But guess what? Even in the full model, female respondents were noticeably more likely to be creationists compared to men. In percentage terms, about 29% of women were predicted to be creationists, compared to just 21% of men. That’s a finding that is both statistically and substantively significant.

Why is this the case? I don’t even want to speculate. So—fire away in the comments.

Before I wrap up, I have to show you how both religion and politics shape creationist views. Of all the variables included in the regression, the one that consistently produced the largest coefficient was a question about the importance of the Bible in the life of the respondent. That tracks, right? But let me illustrate how that question interacts with political partisanship to predict a creationist viewpoint.

First, let’s point out that Democrats are the real outlier here. Among political independents and Republicans, there’s no statistically significant difference in the coefficients. For those two groups, the predicted probability goes from about 11% among folks who place no importance on the Bible to about 20% among independents and Republicans who say that the Bible is very important.

For Democrats, the likelihood of believing in creationism does double when moving from left to right, but the actual percentage-point change is much more modest (from 6% to 12%). But let highlight something that is really fascinating: among Republicans who say that the Bible is not important, 11% are creationists. Among Democrats who say that the Bible is very important, 11% are creationists. There’s a kind of theological conservatism baked into Republicans that defies traditional religious variables. Even Republicans who express no affinity toward religion seem to hold to some pretty traditional, literalist values.

From all of this work, I think I’ve come to a couple of conclusions about the issue of creationism versus evolution:

1. The share of Americans who take a strict creationist view is very low—easily less than 20% of the population. And it’s hard to cut the data in any way that makes that percentage rise significantly.

2. Some of the factors that predict a creationist view are not that surprising: being older, being politically conservative, and believing that the Bible is very important to your life. However, the result for gender is one that I’m going to be contemplating for a while: women are more likely to be creationists than men.

But for anyone who manages to get to the Creation Museum, it seems pretty likely that a significant majority of people perusing the exhibits and taking pictures in front of a full-sized replica of Noah’s Ark don’t actually believe in the biblical account of either event.

Code for this post can be found here.

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Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.