Avoiding Religious Control

America's Most (and Least) Religious Metro Areas

Provo, Utah, tops the list of America's most religious metros, according to survey results recently released by the Gallup Organization. More than three-quarters of residents in this metro reported that they are "very religious." Three of the top five most religious metros are in Alabama — Montgomery, Birmingham, and Huntsville. Jackson, Mississippi, also ranks among the top five.
Burlington, Vermont, and Boulder, Colorado, tie for the title of the nation's least religious metro area. In these two metros, fewer than one in five residents claim to be "very religious." San Francisco and Boston also rank among the least religious metros in America, as only about one in four of their residents say they are "very religious."
The data are based on the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index survey of nearly 250,000 Americans across 189 metros conducted over the course of 2012. 



Religion in America has an unmistakable geographic dimension, as the map below (based on the Gallup-Healthways data) by Zara Matheson of the Martin Prosperity Institute shows. The most religious metros as well as states are in the South, while the least religious are in in the Northeast and West Coast. As Gallup points out: "The most and least religious cities generally reflect the religiousness of the state in which they are located, although there are some interesting exceptions ... America is a remarkably religiously diverse nation, and much of this diversity is geographically based. Residents in some areas and cities — namely, those in the South and in Utah — are two or three times as likely to be very religious as those living in cities in the Northeast, the Northwest, and other Western locations."

Yellow areas have the least religious control




Here is a map by State