Holier than thou? Religious feeling gets charted state to state

This holy season is as good a time as any to consider which of the 50 states has the most religious population, as a matter of curiosity if not bragging rights. But how can religious feeling be measured?

While acknowledging the difficulty, the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life used four criteria to come up with polling data for state-by-state rankings this month: the importance of religion in people's lives, frequency of attendance at worship services, frequency of prayer and absolute certainty of belief in God.

While these measures are questionable -- for example, some deeply religious people aren't necessarily regulars at worship services -- they provide a reasonable guide. So which state has the most religious population? According to the Pew polling data, Mississippi, followed by Alabama and Arkansas. In Mississippi, more than eight in 10 people say religion is very important to their lives.

This isn't much of a surprise, serving more as confirmation that the Bible Belt still holds sway. But does religious belief make people better in Mississippi than they are in Pennsylvania? That is debatable. One doesn't have to be a cynic to note that the outward signs of piety in the South existed cheek and jowl with racial hatred and intolerance, a legacy that, for all the progress, has not disappeared.

As it happens, Pennsylvania ranked 26th in the percentage of people who say religion is very important in their lives (out of 46 states rather than 50, because states with sample sizes too small to analyze were combined). This tends to confound political strategist James Carville's famous saying that Pennsylvania is Pittsburgh in the west and Philadelphia in the east with Alabama in between. Not quite, according to the Pew data. In fact, West Virginia showed more religiosity, ranking 15th.

By the way, the least religious population was found in New Hampshire/Vermont, where only 36 percent said religion is very important to their lives (the national average is 56 percent). This region was followed by rogue Alaska, 37 percent, and liberal Massachusetts, 40 percent, where Puritan preachers once ruled the pulpits.

But no state can say it is holier than thou. The major religions preach an individual reckoning, making it unlikely that St. Peter asks new souls from where they hail.