GOD AND MAMMON, U.S. VERSION….A couple of weeks ago I posted a chart from a Pew global survey showing that the more religious a country is, the poorer it is. Is the same true for U.S. states? Andrew Gelman of Columbia University crunched some numbers and says the answer is yes. His data is at the right, along with an eyeball trendline that I tossed in on a whim. (In other words, don’t blame him for the trendline. He just plotted the data.)
Interestingly, there appears to be no correlation between income and religiosity within states. Religious states are less wealthy in aggregate, but within each state rich people are no more or less likely to be religious than poorer people. Make of this what you will.
