Religious Belief, Education, Intelligence, and Poverty

A new ranking of the most religious states in America shows only 13 states are less religious than Washington.

Is there any benefit enjoyed by landing on either side of the spectrum, of being more (or less) religious?

As it turns out, there is.

Poor people and poorly-educated people are much more likely to hold religious beliefs and believe in a personal god than those who earn more and have been well-educated. Put another way, religious people are poor and stupid (though to hold this as a universal maxim would be silly…in reality, the statement is but an accurate generalization).

“Several research studies have been published on the statistical relationship between religiosity and educational level, or religiosity and IQ. Michael Shermer, in How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science, describes a large survey of randomly chosen Americans that he and his colleague Frank Sulloway carried out. Among their many interesting results was the discovery that religiosity is indeed negatively correlated with education (more highly educated people are less likely to be religious).” (Dawkins 102)

It’s not only education that is inversely correlated with religiosity; intelligence itself is also negatively correlated (which backs up my rather damning charge that “religious people are … stupid”:

“On the subject of religion and IQ, the only meta-analysis known to me was published by Paul Bell in Mensa Magazine in 2002 (Mensa is the society of individuals with a high IQ …). Bell concluded: ‘Of 43 studies carried out since 1927 on the relationship between religious belief and one’s intelligence and/or educational level, all but four found an inverse connection. That is, the higher one’s intelligence or education level, the less one is likely to be religious or hold ‘beliefs’ of any kind.” (Dawkins 103)

Clear signs that economic development is inversely correlated with religiosity are to be found in the new Pew survey. Specifically, it found that the most religious state in the Union is Mississippi, “with 82 percent of its residents saying that religion is important in their lives.” Mississippi also comes up last in another metric: GDP per capita. Unsurprisingly, Utah, which ranks 2nd nationally in Worship Attendance, comes in at 49th in GDP per capita. More compelling is the story on the other end: irreligiosity and wealth are highly correlated. New Hampshire, Vermont, and Alaska score the lowest levels of religiosity nationally, and all three rank in the top half in GDP Per Capita (with New Hampshire and Alaska both scoring in the top quartile). I’ve gone ahead and placed the state rankings of religiosity (2009) and GDP per capita from 2008 next to one another, and found that, on average, states’ per capita GDP ranking falls only 9 places away from its religiosity ranking, showing a correlation much higher than if we were to assign states random rankings. If we were to give the states random rankings in each, we would find that they would average a distance of 16 places apart. The strong correlation points to the existence of a powerful cause, because the correlation is so much higher than the expected result (if the result expected was ‘random’). The field of statistics doesn’t allow us to name the cause simply by noting a correlation; the identity of the cause as well as the nature of its workings is an answer we can only deduce.

I’ll take a stab at it.

During the primitive stages of humanity (let’s use 1776 as a somewhat arbitrary start-date for the modern era) there were a lack of compelling and widely-available explanations for the often complex and elegant occurrences found in nature. Myriad primitive theories were created in order to explain that which defied explanation. Some of these far-fetched theories included demons, spirits, and gods. These archaic explanations, having no proof whatsoever to support their existence, have been largely discredited and replaced by more elegant theories such as evolution by natural selection and those proposed by the natural sciences, which are concordant with observed nature and rely on evidence instead of primitive, baseless deduction. Modern scientific knowledge has only been around for a few hundred years, and widespread mandatory education has only been instituted in the last hundred. As a consequence of the relatively nascent development of both scientific breakthroughs and widespread education, it’s natural that primitive explanations are still common among the uneducated. As education becomes more ubiquitous, and as superstition loses its lustre, quantitative metrics will show a decline in religiosity commensurate with the increased level of education (which itself is largely dependent on economic development). It stands to reason, then, that once the entire planet’s population is relatively developed (to perhaps 1970′s-American standards of living), supernatural explanations for nature’s existence will have hit the tipping point of minority status, and will see their decline quicken. In a postmodern era (2300 CE onward, perhaps), Religion will be confined to a be a chimera of philosophy, community, and morality, and will have definitively given up its self-styled eminence in explaining the natural world.

How Religious Is Your State? – The Pew Forum On Religion And Public Life

Washington in bottom third of states on religious beliefs – PSBJ

List of U.S. states by GDP per capita – Wikipedia