Mr. Jones said he was struck by the prevalence of QAnon’s adherents. Overlaying the share of poll respondents who expressed belief in its core principles over the country’s total population, “that’s more than 30 million people,” he said.
“Thinking about QAnon, if it were a religion, it would be as big as all white evangelical Protestants, or all white mainline Protestants,” he added. “So it lines up there with a major religious group.”
He also noted the correlation between belief in QAnon’s fictions and the conviction that armed conflict would be necessary. “It’s one thing to say that most Americans laugh off these outlandish beliefs, but when you take into consideration that these beliefs are linked to a kind of apocalyptic thinking and violence, then it becomes something quite different,” he said.
The Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core found a strong correlation between where people gets their news and how much they believe in QAnon’s ideas. Among those who said they most trusted far-right news outlets, such as One America News Network and Newsmax, two in five qualified as full-on QAnon believers. Fully 48 percent of these news consumers said they expected a storm to wipe away the elites soon.
That puts these news consumers far out of alignment with the rest of the country — even fans of the conservative-leaning Fox News. Among respondents who preferred Fox News above other sources, 18 percent were QAnon believers.
Mr. Trump himself has avoided saying much about QAnon, but when he was pressed to denounce the theory while in office, he refused. At a news conference last year, he seemed to indicate that he was pleased by QAnon followers’ fondness for him. “I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate,” he said, adding that “the movement” was “gaining in popularity.”
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/us/politics/qanon-republicans-trump.html
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