It wouldn’t be easy for church leaders to sway those opinions, experts say, because allegiance to conspiracy theories bumps into partisan politics and agenda-driven sources.
If almost half of U.S. members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe the “big lie” about the 2020 presidential election and almost a quarter of them subscribe to the QAnon conspiracy theory, what does that say about their ability to discern truth?
In these cases, it may be about nothing more than allegiance to partisan politics or agenda-driven sources.
“Latter-day Saints have been Republicans for a long time,” says Brigham Young University political scientist Quin Monson, “and that’s the identity that is at work here. Party identification is a strong drug.”
The BYU professor’s own surveys echoed the findings of PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute), which showed that 46% of Latter-day Saints believe the “big lie” — that the presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump — ranking behind only white evangelical Protestants (61%) and ahead of white mainline Protestants (37%) and white Catholics (35%).
For Monson, though, the good news is that not all Mormon Republicans support the “big lie.”
“We’ve diverged from evangelicals,” he says. “We haven’t become Democrats, but there is a significant minority who haven’t come fully around to Donald Trump.”
This PRRI survey found that Latter-day Saints joined white evangelicals and Hispanic Protestants as the most likely to believe in QAnon.
PRRI separated aspects of QAnon into three separate questions, Religion News Service reports. One focused on the pedophile assertion, another asked about the coming “storm,” and a third inquired about whether respondents believed “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”
Nearly a fifth (18%) of Latter-day Saints buy into the supposition of devilish pedophiles running the world. Even more (22%) believe a storm will cast out these evildoers. And almost a quarter (24%) say patriots may have to use violence to rescue the nation.
https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2021/06/05/qanon-big-lie-what-might/