Gallup has recently released a full summary of all the data they collected about American religiosity as part of their 2008 daily tracking polls.
The question they asked (to over 355,000 adults) was simple: Is religion an important part of your daily life? And while there are few surprises in the state-level data, I found the national number to be quite surprising.
In response to the above question, the national results looked like this:
65% say that religion is an important part of their daily lives
34% say that it is not
1% don't know or refused to answer (they obviously pushed the undecideds pretty hard)
I find this number surprising in comparison to other polls; not so surprising compared to my life experiences. Here's what I mean: I have lived in this country my entire life. I have lived in red states, and I have lived in blue states. And whenever those polls were released that said that 85% of Americans were religious, I had to scratch my head. Virtually all of the people I knew (twenty-somethings) were about as religious as a box of Oreos. And yet polls come out that claim that
nine out of ten Americans are religious or that almost half the country attends church on any given weekend.
Had I somehow kept hitting the motherlode of godless, freedom-hating, anti-American pagans? Possible, but doubtful. Instead, many social scientists believe that people lie to pollsters about things like religious belief and observance due to what is known as a social desirability bias, or the tendency to tell pollsters what you think society expects of you, rather than the actual truth.
Which is why I was actually surprised to find that Gallup was able to get 34% of the public to admit that religion is not all that important to them. As a caveat, perhaps the word "daily" threw some people, but what is religion, if not something you are expected to live every day?
Now, on to the state data:
It is not surprising to find that the top ten most religious states are all in the South (and Oklahoma):
Likewise, the least religious states are mostly in the Northeast and West:
From this list, I'm not sure what to make of Alaska. Here is a state that I had always assumed was a pretty non-religious place in a typical northern/western sense, but then Sarah Palin came along and blew that perception out of the water. Perhaps some Alaskan Kossacks could help me out - is Wasilla just a hotbed of fundamentalism? Even so, it's hard to imagine any of the other states on this list electing someone like Palin.
For the full list, see here.
Gallup also provides a nice map for us:
So what do you think, Kossacks? Where did your state rank? Does this jibe with your everyday experiences? Do you think the fact that over one third of Americans reported that religion is not "an important part" of their "daily life" is evidence of a long term trend toward greater secularism, or did something about the wording skew the results?
And just to see how godless and freedom-hating we are, I've added a poll.