Religious Nuts... Dangerous To Normal People And An Efficiently Functioning Society

In the new Gallup poll, one is counted as "very religious" if they "affirm that religion is important to his or her daily life and that church is attended either weekly or almost every week." That's 40% of Americans. Another 29% claim to be "moderately religious," meaning "they don’t attend religious services regularly (or that faith is not very important to them, but they still attend church regularly). It probably isn't hard to guess that the most religious states are also the poorest, most racist, least educated and most supportive of right-wing political candidates. Here's the list of "very religious: with Mississippi as #1, of course. The percentage in parenthesis was Romney's winning vote share in 2012.

Mississippi.......... 58% (55%)
Utah.................... 56% (73%)
Alabama............. 56% (61%)
Louisiana............ 53% (58%)
Arkansas............. 52% (60%)
South Carolina.... 52% (55%)
Tennessee........... 50% (59%)
North Carolina.... 48% (50%)
Georgia............... 48% (53%)
Oklahoma............ 48% (67%)

To put this into some kind of context, let's look at what Gallup found to be the least religious states and how they reacted to Romney in November.

Vermont............... 19% (31%)
New Hampshire... 23% (46%)
Maine................... 24% (41%)
Massachusetts....... 27% (37%)
Rhode Island......... 29% (35%)
Oregon.................. 29% (42%)
DC........................ 30% (7%)
Nevada.................. 31% (46%)
Hawaii................... 31% (28%)
Alaska................... 31% (55%)
Connecticut........... 31% (41%)
Washington........... 31% (41%)

Notice the correlation? Belief in fairy tales, superstition and an authoritarian father figure living in the sky correlates positively with a political platform based on greed, selfishness, hatred and bigotry. And it always has.