White Evangelicals’ Coronavirus Concerns Are Fading Faster

But when it comes to behavior, evangelicals are as likely as the rest of the country to keep up social distancing, according to Data for Progress survey.

In the months since the coronavirus pandemic hit the US, the country has become less worried about the disease and less likely to adhere to the public heath advice to slow its spread. But have those shifts been consistent across all Americans?

Data from two months of weekly surveys finds that while compliance with behaviors is waning, the decline is especially acute among white evangelical Protestants.

White evangelicals more closely resembled the overall population earlier in the pandemic, according to findings released today from Data for Progress, a left-leaning think tank. But the gap between the two is widening.

In April, when New York City was reporting 4,000 new cases each day, three quarters of the public indicated that they were worried about contracting the coronavirus. Nearly the same share of white evangelicals (72.2%) were worried.

By June, concern among the general public had dropped by 9.4 percentage points, while the decline among white evangelicals was nearly double: 16.7 percent.

The fading concern over the coronavirus has carried over into whether Americans are complying with suggested public health protocols. People are becoming less likely to take precautions, but as they venture into public more often, they are more likely to wear masks than back in March.

Coronavirus responses have been highly politicized from the start. While white evangelicals tend to be strongly Republican—and both groups are less worried about COVID-19 than the rest of the population—there are differences in evangelical and Republican behavior.

White evangelicals are around 7 percentage points more likely than Republicans to say that they have been avoiding personal contact and crowds over the last three months. When it comes ...