About Those Irreligious New Englanders
Call it the story that won’t die. A 2012 Gallup Poll purported to reveal that New Englanders are the least religious of all Americans, with Vermonters leading the non-churched pack and Bay Staters checking in at number four.
This data has been endlessly recycled, including in a recent Boston Globe column. It’s also been red meat for conservative evangelicals, who have flooded talk shows, editorial pages and the blogosphere with comments suggesting that New England is Sodom and the West Coast is Gomorrah. Alas, it has also provoked counter-responses from the unchurched that fall considerably short of enlightened skepticism.
It’s child’s play to cast doubt on the data. As the 2012 election results proved, Gallup is many years removed from conducting truly scientific polling. Second, Gallup measured a single criterion: the percentage of each state’s residents that attend religious services in a given week. There is no way of knowing from the Gallup data whether the same individuals attend regularly or randomly, not can we infer anything about what attendees believe or practice.
To paraphrase a youth minister friend, the idea that attending services makes you religious is like spending time in a garage and thinking you’re a car. Gallup numbers are in need of serious parsing, the likes of which is done each year by the Pew Research Center.
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