By John Brummett
Christmas Eve provides either the best or worst time for observation and commentary on recent studies of American religious attitudes by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
One of these studies purports to show that traditional church-going religious devoutness is strongest in the area of the country that, it so happens, contains the best college football, the poorest people and the least regard for Barack Obama.
I refer, of course, to the South and Southeast, from Arkansas down to Louisiana and eastward along the Gulf Coast over to the end of the earth in South Carolina.
Arkansas comes in second, tied with Alabama but distantly behind Mississippi, in the percentage of population holding church-going to be important.
At 74 percent, we’re 18 points above the national average on that. And we’re more than double the 36 percent that holds religion dear in New Hampshire and Vermont, where the football teams aren’t worth a darn and they elect a guy with socialist leanings like Bernie Sanders to the U.S. Senate.
In Arkansas, we’re 5th in regular church attendance, 7th in frequency of prayer and 5th in belief in God.
The top 10 states in all those categories extend from Oklahoma through us and into the Southeast.
Plainly, traditional religious devotion has political and cultural overtones. Those states most religious in the traditional sense are also the most culturally and politically conservative. Republican, that is.
They also have some of the nation’s most severe poverty and some of the nation’s most stubbornly lingering racial division and inequality. In fact, the state ranked first in all major religious observance categories is also the state with the lowest per capita income and the greatest heritage of race problems, that being, of course, Mississippi.
All of that probably means that poor and oppressed people desperately need something positive in their lives and that church provides the only something. It also probably means that states with the most static populations, meaning without great influxes of people moving in from other areas of the country, tend to cling to the way they’ve always done things.
Pew also has recently released other religious studies, the most interesting of which showed that record numbers of Americans say their religious practice is more spiritual these days than traditionally religious, and that they no longer identify so much with any particular denomination.
Many pick and choose, even among Christian and Jewish and Eastern concepts.
One clergyman calls this a “divine deli,” and says it’s not necessarily good because fashioning your own religion from a buffet can have the effect of making it less sacred than it needs to be.
It is generally reflective of young people in the modern American culture. They are accustomed to custom-fitting their independent lives.
They needn’t listen to the radio to hear a favorite song. They can play it on their phones. They don’t need to wait for the Postal Service to send a letter. They text. They don’t need to stay at home to catch a TV program. They set the DVR.
So it is becoming likewise, apparently, with religion. These kids are downloading their own. Religion gets arranged into its own IPod playlist.
Except, that is, in the Southeastern Conference, where we tailgate on Saturday and take communion on Sunday; where we worship the hog on Saturday and the Lord on Sunday.
Always have, and, for a good while longer, I suspect, still will.
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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.
