{"id":1105,"date":"2013-10-31T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-10-31T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/10\/why-is-mississippi-more-religious-than-new-hampshire.html"},"modified":"2013-10-31T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-10-31T09:00:00","slug":"why-is-mississippi-more-religious-than-new-hampshire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/10\/why-is-mississippi-more-religious-than-new-hampshire.html","title":{"rendered":"Why Is Mississippi More Religious Than New Hampshire?"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><div style=\"background-color: white;line-height: 20px\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">New Hampshire is the least\u00a0<a class=\"pt-basics-link decorated-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.psychologytoday.com\/basics\/religion\" title=\"Psychology Today looks at Religion\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">religious<\/a>\u00a0state in the union and Mississippi is the most religious according to Gallup data. A minority of New Hampshire residents see religion as being important in their daily lives (46 percent) in contrast to a large majority of Mississippians (85 percent). How can such huge differences be explained?<\/span><\/div>\n<div style=\"background-color: white;line-height: 20px\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\"><br><\/span><\/div>\n<div style=\"background-color: white;line-height: 20px\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">The Gallup organization (who collect the data in phone surveys) notes on their\u00a0<a class=\"ext decorated-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.gallup.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">website<\/a><span class=\"ext\"><\/span>\u00a0that state differences in religiosity are poorly understood, and they are correct. Astonishingly, researchers have never crunched the numbers in an effort to understand religious differences within the country. So I decided to be the first to do so.<\/span><\/div>\n<div style=\"background-color: white;line-height: 20px\"><strong><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\"><br><\/span><\/strong><\/div>\n<div style=\"background-color: white;line-height: 20px\"><strong><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">Quality of life<\/span><\/strong><\/div>\n<div style=\"background-color: white;line-height: 20px\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">I wondered whether state differences might follow a similar pattern as that already established for different countries. Various researchers report that religion declines as the quality of life improves. Evidently, religion acts as a form of emotion-focused coping in the jargon of clinical psychology. This means that miserable living conditions drive people into churches.<\/span><\/div>\n<div style=\"background-color: white;line-height: 20px\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\"><br><\/span><\/div>\n<div style=\"background-color: white;line-height: 20px\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">In sub-Saharan Africa, where the quality of life is abysmal, almost\u00a0<a class=\"ext decorated-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Atheism-Will-Replace-Religion-ebook\/dp\/B00886ZSJ6\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">everyone is religious<\/a><span class=\"ext\"><\/span>\u00a0(1). The quality of life is much better in Europe and religion is at a very low ebb.<\/span><\/div>\n<div style=\"background-color: white;line-height: 20px\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">This raises the question of whether New Hampshire resembles Europe in having a good quality of life and weak religion. Is Mississippi more like sub-Saharan Africa in having a lower quality of life and stronger religion?<\/span><\/div>\n<div style=\"background-color: white;line-height: 20px\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\"><br><\/span><\/div>\n<div style=\"background-color: white;line-height: 20px\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">Read the rest <a href=\"http:\/\/www.psychologytoday.com\/blog\/the-human-beast\/201310\/why-is-mississippi-more-religious-new-hampshire\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">here<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>New Hampshire is the least\u00a0religious\u00a0state in the union and Mississippi is the most religious according to Gallup data. A minority of New Hampshire residents see religion as being important in their daily lives (46 percent) in contrast to a large majority of Mississippians (85 percent). How can such huge differences be explained? The Gallup organization [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Why Is Mississippi More Religious Than New Hampshire?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"New Hampshire is the least&nbsp;religious&nbsp;state in the union and Mississippi is the most religious according to Gallup data. 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