The Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life recently released a study on the United States’ most religious states and, in a stunning non-shocker, the most religious areas of the country lie below the Mason-Dixon line.
When asked how important religion was in their daily lives, residents of Mississippi were the most religious in the country, with 82 percent saying religion was very important to them, followed by respondents from Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Tennessee. In fact, nine of the top 10 most religious states hail from what we’d normally call “the South,” and No. 7 Oklahoma isn’t exactly too far north, either.
New England, meanwhile, is the nation’s hotbed for secularism, with six of the bottom seven states hailing from the northeast. Only 36 percent of folks in either New Hampshire or Vermont say that religion’s very important to them. Alaska, oddly enough, was just in front of those two, and a couple of other western states — Oregon and my home state of Colorado — were quite secular, too.
All of this is pretty interesting, but what does it really tell us?
Political wonks might suggest the study says something about our political red state/blue state divide … except that Alaska, home to Sarah Palin and a reliable Republican stronghold for the last 50 years or so, is quite secular.
New England secularists will point out that New Englanders are far more educated than folks down south. And it’s true that 33.6 percent of Vermont’s population has bachelor’s degrees, compared to just 18.9 percent in Mississippi. But Wyoming — far more secular than, say, Georgia or North Carolina, has far fewer college graduates per capita than either.
Oddly enough, just a few days before Pew released its study, a separate report measured states on their comparative happiness — and the results were pretty interesting.
Louisiana topped the list, followed by Hawaii, Florida, Tennessee, Arizona and Mississippi. Check these states’ religiosity, and only Arizona registers as being below average in religiosity — and even there, 51 percent of Arizonans still say religion is very important to them. The bottom-dwellers on the happiness index were Indiana, Michigan, New Jersey, Connecticut and (bringing up the rear) New York — all states that, according to Pew’s figures, were less religious than the national norm.
Now, far be it from me to suggest that religion can make one happier, but …
