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U.S.: How religious is your state?

shemp

a flimsy character...perfidious and despised
shemp
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The U.S., a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
I'm proud to say that my state, New Hampshire, ranks 50th of 50! Only 15% "in New Hampshire are highly religious, based on an overall scale of religiousness," and only 33% "say they believe in God or a universal spirit with absolute certainty."

www.pewresearch.org

Most and least religious U.S. states

Explore our interactive database to find how religious adults are in your state based on service attendance, prayer, belief in God, and importance of religion.
www.pewresearch.org www.pewresearch.org
https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/state/new-hampshire

Not surprisingly, the top 17 are red states.
 
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Mine (NJ) is in the miidle of the pack at #27, Pretty much my experience is that people are nominally one thing or another, or 'yeah I don't go to church and all that except Christmas and Easter'. Not many saying 'I'm an atheist' outright, nor many holy rollers beating you over the head with a barbed wire wrapped Bible.
 
What!? Utah ranks only #6? I'm shocked!

Well, no, not that shocked. You think of Mormons when you think of Utah, appropriately enough. But only around 40% of the Utah population identifies as Mormon. And paradoxically you find a lot more lapsed and disaffected Mormons here, mostly because they were just brought up that way culturally but never had strong faith in it.
 
JayUtah said:
What!? Utah ranks only #6? I'm shocked!

Well, no, not that shocked. You think of Mormons when you think of Utah, appropriately enough. But only around 40% of the Utah population identifies as Mormon. And paradoxically you find a lot more lapsed and disaffected Mormons here, mostly because they were just brought up that way culturally but never had strong faith in it.
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And by their number the religiously affiliated are down 20% in just under 20 years. This is a slightly bigger drop than the US as a whole during the same time, but in the same range.

This is good news to me, but I think it also underlies at least part of the rise of christian nationalism. They're feeling like they're losing what has been a long place of default privilege. To them, this actually feels like an attack on their way of life. After all, they're actually in the right whereas these "others" are sinning interlopers, right?

I hope over time this leads, as religious affiliation continues to drop, to moving the religious right out of such a strong position in politics. But they will fight tooth and nail, and since they are more likely to vote in bloc, they can have great influence even as a minority.
 
From CA and Live in CO. I'm going to guess I grew up in a not very religious state and am no in a medium religious state. Now I will go look at the website.

ETA: Almost exactly the same. In the middle of the pack. That is surprising. It really feels like my CO big city neighbors are more likely religious than my smalltown neighbors were in CA.
 
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My state is a province, and I assume a few people go to church on Sundays, because churches exist. Although they sometimes close and are put up for sale. But it has been many years since any religion topic has come up in a conversation I have been privy to. Based on only personal experience it appears that religion is non-existent here.
 
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theprestige said:
Based on it being a culture prone to the failure modes of religion: faith over facts, dogmatism, persecution of heretics. But it seems shemp has a much narrower, theism-only concept of religion in mind, so I'll stop here.
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Sounds like you're the one with an idiosyncratic concept of religion, one which, given your adherence to the Trump cult, would make you religious. Also, how is this shemp's doing? He cited a study.
 
The survey does seem to have a bias towards the definition: "Religion" = mainstream/evangelical Christianity. What about other religions? E.g. Muslims, for most of whom daily prayer is a staple.
 
Norman Alexander said:
The survey does seem to have a bias towards the definition: "Religion" = mainstream/evangelical Christianity. What about other religions? E.g. Muslims, for most of whom daily prayer is a staple.
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I'm not sure where you're getting this. I see nothing to suggest a bias towards Christianity. Prayer frequency was one of the factors the study used.
There *is* a bias towards affiliation with some sort of organized religion; I'm fine with that, as long as it's understood and acknowledged.
 
Interactive database that doesn't work in my browser. Because a text list or sortable table of the relevant percentages by state would be too easy to read and examine.
 
Reformed Offlian said:
I'm not sure where you're getting this. I see nothing to suggest a bias towards Christianity. Prayer frequency was one of the factors the study used.
There *is* a bias towards affiliation with some sort of organized religion; I'm fine with that, as long as it's understood and acknowledged.
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There are plenty of religious non-Christians in the USA. They don't all live in the traditional Christian states. In fact, in many cases they might wish to avoid them. Therefore you would expect some bias away from the utterly predictable stats this report gives.
 
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