How Religious Is Your State?

I came across this at Patrick Madrid's site and found it to be pretty interesting:

The Pew Forum has come out with a new study showing the relative levels of religious activity based on four measurements: "the importance of religion in people's lives, frequency of attendance at worship services, frequency of prayer and absolute certainty of belief in God."

Which of the 50 states has the most religious population? Since there are many ways to define "religious," there is no single answer to this question. But to give a sense of how the states stack up, the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life used polling data to rank them on four measures: the importance of religion in people's lives, frequency of attendance at worship services, frequency of prayer and absolute certainty of belief in God. Mississippi stands out on all four, and several other Southern states also rank very high on the measures.

See how the states rank according to each of the four measures in the interactive graphic by clicking here.

States with sample sizes that are too small to analyze are combined. As a result, the lowest ranking is 46 rather than 50,

Not surprisingly, the ten most religious states are in the South, in the heart of the Bible belt. I applaud them. Also, not surprisingly, about half of the dozen least religious ones are the heavily "Catholic" states of Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, California, and Connecticut. Sad. Very sad.