How Religious is Your State?

Via PZ Myers, a new study ranking states according to claims by residents of religion's importance in their lives.

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 the interactive charts here.

Kentucky ranks 10th on "importance of religion," with 67 percent saying religion is very important in their lives. No surprise there, but the median among states is 56 - fifty-six percent say religion is very important in their lives.

Hmmm. I'm an out-and-proud atheist, but I'd have to say religion is very important in my life, too. Not because atheism is a religion - it's not - but because as an atheist in Kentucky my life is continually disrupted by the superstitious beliefs of the freakazoids.

Public school teachers not allowed to teach actual facts and science about evolution. No one allowed to purchase liquor from package stores on Sunday. Prayers at every public event. An Attorney General and U.S. Senate Candidate who is wasting my tax dollars to demand the Supreme Court of the United States endorse his hallucination that an invisible sky wizard runs the state Department of Homeland Security.

Yeah, religion is very important in my life - I have to fight the idiocy every single day.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....