Church attendance inversely proportional to intelligence, duh
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That headline should generate some very colorful comments, but it’s true, sort of, I swear. The fancy, godless maps and charts below show that –generally speaking – the states whose residents attend Church the least are the smartest, and those states whose residents attend Church the most are the most stupidest. Ready to have your snobbish, Yankee predispositions reaffirmed with science?!
This chart shows that basically everybody who goes to church all the time lives either in the South or in Utah, the ”11 Grades Is More Tahn Enuf” state. [via Yglesias]
That map groups the Midwest in with the South, but the according to Gallup:
Nine of the top 10 states in church attendance — Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas — are in the South. Utah, with its high concentration of churchgoing Mormons, provides a Western exception.
Mississippi, it turns out, is the church-goingest state in the union, and filthy filthy Vermont is the least. Now, how do those two states stack up against each other on the Smartness Chart? Well, eh, it’s a bit of a mismatch. Vermont is the smartest state, and Mississippi ranks 48th, ahead of only Nevada and Arizona. Sorry about the blurriness.
I don’t want to make too much of this, but I would like to quickly ask: WHERE’S YOUR GOD NOW, THE SOUTH?
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There are many ways to rate someone’s intelligence. Your ignorant piece just flunked that test.
You’re entitled to poke fun at religion in general, but don’t overlook the fact that belief in philosophies can be just as ridiculous and every bit the minefield as religion is.
Following your logic, John, communist China should be the smartest place on the planet, being state-controlled atheist. As they say there, you can talk about anything except politics.
This is total bullshit.
You took two unrelated maps and overlayed them onto each other. The only way to measure a correlation would be to research intelligence of people who go to church and compare it with people who don’t go to church. And even that is so vague it’s not worthwhile.
I could put any two maps together.
And the ’smartest’ states are determined solely by pre-college school testing scores. Its about the (supposed) intelligence of children (who often have no say in how often THEY go to church anyway).
There are a million factors why people go to church. I bet you’ll find maps that display data on poverty and race can fit nicely into these two as well. You can draw any conclusions you want if you’re going to be this silly about it (black people are stupid, white people go to church more, poor people are spanish, etc)
It’s okay to be obsessed with thinking church goers are stupid, but if that’s the position you take, your methodology should rise above that aforementioned trait.
PS, trueslant is difficult and I hate having to add it to facebook to comment here.
Oh, hold on a second before getting your rosaries all in a twist, y’all.
I’ve got some science for you fellow commenters. This article has 224 words in it, and if we count John’s “sort of”, “generally speaking”, and “basically”, a full 2.25% of this article is dedicated to deflating these stats and deflecting your knee-jerk-twice, read-blogs-once responses. 2.25% is a lot.
Moreover, if you look at the “Smartest State” spread, you’ll see that North Carolina is the only Southern state to eek its way above the mean. So as amusing as this blog-post is, it is, sort of, generally speaking, basically correct.
Utah is home to Chris Buttars and Orrin Hatch. I don’t need a study to tell me that we aren’t one of the smartest states in the union. But we do have lots of Jesus.