Gallup conducted a poll asking "Is religion an important part of your daily life?" Here are the results, by state: http://www.gallup.com/poll/114022/State-States-Importance-Religion.aspx#1 Here's a map: An interesting note that is not mentioned in the article: I would assume that almost all respondents in the South were referring to some form of Christianity, while places like New York (Judaism), Michigan (Islam), California (Buddhism) would have relatively more respondents referring to other religions.
Those people are such small parts of the population that I don't think they would have any influence on this graph.
I'm surprised that California is listed as religious as it is. I'd thought it would have been listed as least. Perhaps they counted global warming zealots.
get with it, buddy. it's climate change! the buzzword for the new century is "change". the old French saying ( Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose ) cannot be true, apparently. but back to religiosity: California has its bastions of political conservatism, which is often accompanied by religious practice.
and you think he hasn't yet? how about the influx of people from the Plains States during the Dust Bowl years?
Maybe God punished California by sending lots of people from Latin America. It feels good to be the instrument of God's wrath.
Muslims blowin' the curve in Michigan? I don't think so. Ever been to Grand Rapids? There's your answer. Michigan's shit-kicker population rivals that of some smaller states in the South.
California would collapse without the Latinos. Well, it's collapsing anyway, but it would collapse faster without us.
who's "us"? there hardly more "argentine soccer fans" in California than Austrian expatriate governators.
Us Latin Americans. We are the instruments of God's wrath by destroying your culture, but also the instrument of God's mercy by keeping your economy from collapsing completely.
Talk is cheap A much more interesting study would be to find out where religion actually IS an important part of peoples' daily lives, not to mention if they actually follow the ethical codes and practices laid down by their respective churches/temples/ synagogues/mosques/stone circles/sacred groves/etc.
Re: Talk is cheap So, what we need is a survey that will tell us what people believe in their hearts as opposed to simply showing up for the head count? I think, Christians at least, would call that judgment day.
Re: Talk is cheap while i get your point, i think that was the point of the survey. the problem is that most people think they follow much better than they do, because most of us are more like Pharisees than like what Jesus called his disciples to do. what stands in for discipleship, in a large percentage of people, especially among Christians, but i would suppose the same to be true for others, is that we do what we can to obey the principle of not doing wrong, when doing wrong would be significantly less advantageous. and when i say "significantly less advantageous", i mean that the short- or long-term costs of doing wrong are outweighted by the perceived short-term benefits. to cite an example: many Christians agree that we should never harm someone, regardless of the provocation. ( i'm not talking about self-defense ) but we will very easily try to prevent someone from getting ahead of us in traffic or take the slightest opportunity to "teach someone a lesson", even though it's none of our business what they've done. one of the reasons for this is that we don't make a point of training people to be free to act as Jesus would act in the same circumstances. "free to act as Jesus would act" means that we have subjected our agenda/objectives to God in such a way that we are obeying Him in His way. the profoundest intent of WWJD was to search out that concept and act on it, but it became trivialized because of a couple of factors, not the least of which is that doing what Jesus would do almost always causes some suffering. suffering is not popular.
True enough. But I'm also not from California. It's not people from the East Coast retiring to Oregon who mightily contributed to the real estate bubble in Bend.
i heart Bend. sadly we won't be going thru Bend anymore, mostly because there are so few chances to find help in a medical emergency between Bend and the Columbia River Gorge that it would be almost foolhardy for someone my age ( ) to make the 3 hour drive from Bend to The Dalles. i don't heart I-5 or I-84.