Among major U.S. religious groups, only Jews and white evangelicals see Israel positively
Views of Americans in general growing increasingly hostile to the Jewish state
It isn’t surprising that American Jews have a mostly positive views toward Israel — in fact, according to a Pew Research Center report just published, almost two-thirds do. The same is true of an almost identical number of white evangelicals.
What might be surprising is that no other religious groups included in the survey results do. As would be expected, American Muslims are the least receptive to Israel: Only 4 percent say they have a favorable view of Israel. For most other religious groups, Israel’s favorability rating is in the 30-some percent range.
The survey results come from a responses by 3,507 U.S. adults1 from Pew’s American Trends Panel during March 23-29 — a period when news was dominated by the current U.S.-Israeli war against Iran before a ceasefire had been announced.
Here’s the precise breakdown of positive feelings toward Israel by religious group:
🟪 White evangelical Protestants: 65%
🟪 Jews: 64%
🟪 White nonevangelical Protestants: 39%
🟪 Catholics: 35%
🟪 Black Protestants: 33%
🟪 Religiously unaffiliated: 22%
🟪 Muslims: 4%
Overall, 37 percent of Americans have a favorable view of Israel; the views of 60 percent are unfavorable.
According to Pew, the overall views toward Israel have grown more negative during the past year: The 60 percent unfavorable rating is up from last year’s 53 percent.
In addition to the religious divisions, the poll also found sharp divisions by age and party affiliation:
🟪 About half of Americans 50 and over, 49 percent, said they have an unfavorable view of Israel. For Americans 18 to 49, the total was 70 percent.
🟪 Among Republicans, 41 percent were unfavorable toward Israel; for Democrats the total was 80 percent.
Jews and Muslims were oversampled in the survey to reduce the margin of error for those groups, then the results from them weighted accordingly for national totals. The margin of error for all groups when totaled is about 2 percent, with higher margins of error for individual groups.