People walk around between Temple Square and the Conference Center between morning and afternoon sessions of the 189th Semiannual General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at the Conference Center in Salt Lake City on Saturday, Oct. 5, 2019.

Pew Research Center released its latest look at the favorability of various faith groups on Wednesday, including members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The new survey showed that, similar to their feelings on some other minority faith groups, a solid majority of U.S. adults feel neutral about Latter-day Saints or feel as if they don’t know enough about the faith group to have an opinion either way.

One quarter of Americans hold an unfavorable view of Latter-day Saints, while 15% express favorable opinions. These results put Latter-day Saints near the same group of faith groups they’ve clustered with in past surveys on Pew’s overall favorability chart.

(Pew uses the terms “Mormons” and “Latter-day Saints” interchangeably in the new report but church members often refer to themselves as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or just Latter-day Saints.)

The survey also found that a large majority of Latter-day Saints hold a favorable view of fellow members and have a particularly positive view of other groups studied in the survey, including atheists.

Atheists and Muslims were the other two groups with a “balance of opinion” (calculated by subtracting the share of American with unfavorable views from the share with favorable views) below zero.

Meanwhile, Jews, mainline Protestants and Catholics remain quite popular, with the share of Americans who hold favorable views of these faith groups outweighing the share of Americans who hold negative views by at least 15 percentage points, Pew found.

Latter-day Saints, Muslims and atheists were clustered together around the 50-degree mark of the “feeling thermometer” that Pew used to study American attitudes toward various faith groups in 2014 and 2017. In those studies, respondents were asked to rate their feelings for the groups on a scale from 0 to 100, with 0 being the most negative.

In the new survey, Pew adopted a different approach, asking respondents to say whether their views toward each faith group in the study are “very favorable,” “somewhat favorable,” “neither favorable nor unfavorable,” “somewhat unfavorable” or “very unfavorable.” Participants could also declare that they “don’t know enough to say.”

The new survey design allowed researchers to “separate out people who have a neutral opinion,” said Patricia Tevington, a research associate for Pew. As it turns out, many Americans fall into that camp.

“There’s a plurality of people who don’t register an opinion when it comes to these groups,” Tevington said. For example, 59% of U.S. adults are neutral or don’t know enough to have an opinion on Latter-day Saints.

Researchers were also able to separate out responses from the members of each faith group studied to show how the group’s overall score changed without those responses. Generally, groups had less positive results after the separation, Tevington noted.

“Religious groups by and large have pretty favorable views of themselves,” she said.

That’s true for Latter-day Saints, according to the new report. But there aren’t enough Latter-day Saints in the United States for this positivity to meaningfully pull up the group’s overall score, Tevington said.

The group of evangelical Protestants, on the other hand, is big enough to notably affect their faith group’s results.

“Overall, similar shares of the whole public say they view evangelical Christians favorably (28%) and unfavorably (27%). But among Americans who are not themselves born-again or evangelical Protestants, the balance of opinion is much more negative (32% unfavorable vs. 18% favorable),” Pew reported.

A faith group’s size also helps determine how many Americans know one of its members, which, in turn, affects how the group is viewed. Americans who personally know a Catholic, Muslim or member of another faith group generally view Catholics, Muslims and members of that other faith group, as a whole, more favorably, Tevington said.

“For example, about 4 in 10 non-Jews who know a Jewish person (42%) express positive views of Jews, double the share among non-Jews who do not personally know someone in this religious group (21%),” Pew reported. “However, the share of non-Jews who express a negative view toward Jews is similar regardless of whether they know someone who is Jewish or do not (6% and 7%, respectively).”

This pattern, like positive self-ratings, can give a favorability boost to larger faith groups.

Here are some other notable takeaways from the report:

Pew’s findings are based on a survey of 10,588 U.S. adults conducted online from Sept. 13-18, 2022. The margin of error for the full sample is plus or minus 1.5 percentage points.

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