That Old Time Religion would be Jewish, so I don’t understand why the Southern backwoods churches sing about it. A McClatchy news item today http://www.kentucky.com/faith/story/1079670.html reports a study showing religious belief and prayer is most strong in the South and to a lesser degree in the Western hands-off-my-guns states. Mississippi is the very epicenter of churchiness. It also sports the lowest median family income of all the States. One can’t help but think that there is a relationship of fundamentalist belief and the prevalence of violence, racial animosity, parochialism, poverty, tobacco spitting, and garden variety ignorance. As old Scrooge was told, the worst of these is ignorance. A Wiki posting on Religiosity and Intelligence cites numerous studies that show that intelligence and education are negatively related to religiosity. It may be that brighter and more educated persons are also more agnostic. Not only in American states, but in whole nations, as education is high, religion is low. The Wiki article mentions a controversial study by Helmuth Nyborg and Richard Lynn that showed that well educated nations are less religious. ‘Among the sample of 137 countries, only 23 (17%) had more than 20% of atheists, which constituted “virtually all the higher IQ countries.” The authors reported a correlation of 0.60 between atheism rates and level of intelligence, which is “highly statistically significant.” ‘
The Old Time Religion
The McClatchy article carried in the Lexington Herald-Leader displayed a map which was striking in showing how prayer and church-going is most strong throughout Dixie-land. It is only natural to conclude that this seems to be trait that goes along the worst of Southern sentiments. The map has a prominent outlier: Utah, where Mormons reign supreme. Utah in general has a population that is relatively high in education and income. There is some evidence that Mormons who are more highly educated are more religious. This seems to indicate that perhaps one type of religious belief or the nature of literal belief systems is related to intelligence and education. The history of formal education, of universities and universal education is also the story of religious leadership at least in Catholicism, both in its aggressive Jesuit tradition, and in Catholicism-lite, the Anglicans. Possibly in Islam too, some of the great advances in education and science were made by highly religious persons and institutions, although in Muslim countries it seems like everything is religious except in Ataturk’s Turkey. Probably Jews have a corner on the greatest advances in literacy and science but Jews, at least today, are not often highly religious at least in the US and Europe.
Nonetheless, the map of the praying South is striking and scary. It may just be those stomping, snaky, shaking Bible-thumpers, but it is true that God and Guns and Goober go together.
Two Strikes 