‘Tis the season to judge your neighbors for their impiety, and this year the Pew Research Center is helping with this time-honored tradition.
The polling organization recently released rankings on the religiosity of the states, based on 2007 survey responses to four questions: the importance of religion in people’s lives, frequency of attendance at worship services, frequency of prayer and absolute certainty of belief in God.
Based on those responses, Mississippi has the most religious population. The states whose populations report the least religious behavior are New Hampshire, Vermont, Alaska and Maine.
Mississippi was the top-ranked state in all four polling categories, and several other Southern states also ranked very high on the measures.
For example, 91 percent of Mississippians said they believed in God with absolute certainty. By contrast, 54 percent of residents of Vermont and New Hampshire (whose populations were combined because of the small sample size) said the same. And in Mississippi, 77 percent of respondents said they prayed at least once a day, compared with 40 percent in Maine.
For more information on the religious traditions in your own state, go to the Pew site.