Survey: US Muslims more gay-friendly than Evangelicals; nonreligious most accepting of all

A new survey from the Pew Research Center shows how public acceptance of homosexuality has changed in the US over the last decade, and the results are positive, if unsurprising, particularly for Muslims:

In a survey conducted between January and May, 52 percent of U.S. Muslims said homosexuality should be accepted by society — an increase of 25 percentage since 2007. Comparatively, only 34 percent of white evangelical Protestants said they believed homosexuality should be accepted, the smallest percentage of any group surveyed.

[…]

While results found that acceptance of homosexuality in the U.S. Muslim community corresponds with wider acceptance in the U.S. general public, there remained generational differences in acceptance within both populations. Researchers found younger U.S. Muslims are more accepting of homosexuality than their older counterparts. Within the U.S. Muslim community, 60 percent of millennials said homosexuality should be accepted in society — 14 percentage points fewer than the general millennial population in 2016. In contrast, the U.S. Muslim "Baby Boomer or older" demographic had a 42 percent acceptance rating of homosexuality in 2017, 11 points lower than the general population’s acceptance rate around the same time.

This is all to be expected, as it reflects what we see all around society: the younger, more educated and less religious a person is, the more likely they are to be open-minded towards other people and their way of life. The same holds true regardless what faith people are raised in, albeit to varying degrees.

However, there’s one part of the NBC report I have to pick at:

White mainline Protestants had the highest acceptance rate of homosexuality, with 76 percent saying it should be accepted by society — a 23 percent jump from a decade prior.

Whilst it’s good that White Protestants are generally less bigoted than other denominations are (unlike Black Protestants, unfortunately), they aren’t the most accepting, according to the same Pew survey:

As you can see in the highlighted section, “[u]naffiliated” respondents – aka religious “nones” – score the highest on the acceptance scale, with 80% to White mainline Protestants’ 76%. In fact, the nonreligious have the highest acceptance rating of any group in each of the measured years.

I wonder if it has anything to do with their choice not to base their worldview on an ancient text full of antiquated ideas and condemnations of “sinful” behaviors.