To Hard for God — August, 2007
I was driving home from work a week or two ago, losing my patience behind a slow-moving dump truck (which I'm wont to do), when my eyes happened upon this airbrushed painting on the back of said dump truck:
(topher's rendition of the painting—[SIC])
I chuckled a bit, thinking at least one thing is too hard for the "omnipotent deity", and then forgot about it. But then I began noticing church signs with horrific spelling and grammar issues, such as this one:
(topher's rendition of a church sign he saw—[SIC])
This got me to thinking about a possible correlation between literacy and religiosity, which intrigued me. So I had to look deeper. I started digging, looking for data on literacy and religiosity by state. The Census Bureau stopped measuring religious factors decades ago, so I reached a dead end there. But several religious organizations have engaged in studies to measure the relative presence of faith in each of our 50 states. And, obviously, data on literacy by state are fairly easy to find.
The faith data I found categorized states into one of five groups based on the relative presence of theists. Each state was rated on the number of congregations in the state, the number of people reporting themselves as "theistic", and the number of people per 1,000 who reported themselves as "theistic". An example graph for the number of congregations per state is below:
Source: Association of Religious Data Archives
I then chose literacy data that likewise categorized states based on a relative measure. The states were categorized based on the presence of individuals with a Level 1 literacy ability (functional illiteracy). In this manner, both sets of data were categorical, which facilitated easier comparisons. The literacy chart is below:
Source: Maryland State Department of Education
I threw the four categorical measures of faith and literacy that I found into a spreadsheet and started doing some number crunching. First I grouped the states based on their literacy and measured the average categorical religiosity of the states in those groups. But I began thinking that regional differences may have an influence on literacy that has nothing to do with faith—relative immigrant populations, for instance. So I decided to group each state by religiosity and compare the average categorical literacy of each group. By looking at the numbers both ways, I figured I would at least be doing something to counteract the influence of regionalism on both literacy and religiosity, because there are also regional trends in theism as you roam around our 50 states, to be sure.
Here's what I came up with:
This graph groups states based on the presence of functionally illiterate citizens. The more literate states are at the top; the least literate state, obviously, is at the bottom. At the right of each group is the average "Religiosity Index", which is simply the average placement of each state within the three categorical measurements of theism. Illiterate states, it appears, are more theistic.
Of course, as mentioned, I worked the data the other way, too, grouping the states by religiosity and then measuring the average illiteracy. So let's see what that looks like:
In this graph I segregated the states based on their relative religiosity, using the categories as boundaries between groups. New York stands on its own as the most "religious" state, based on the measures I used. As we move from the top of the graph toward the bottom, I guess you could say the states become more sinful and libidinous. But you'll hopefully notice that as you approach the bottom of the graph, the states become more literate as well (on average). And the groupings of states differ from the previous graph, so at least something has been done to offset regional trends in theism and literacy. Again, illiterate states, it appears, are more theistic.
I can't say that these numbers surprise me. But in the interest of reducing the emotionally-charged backlash I expect from this thought, I'm only going to draw one public conclusion on these data, and it is this: Churches should probably start to intersperse some reading groups into their bingo schedules.
~ topher
Note: Level 1 literacy chart
