The 10 Most (and Least) Bible-Minded Cities

[onager]

Recent article from Christianity Today.

With an obvious problem - just like those surveys about church attendance, this one apparently relies on the survey subject to tell the truth. And people have notoriously bad memories about their religious practices, as those same church-attendance surveys show.

Anyway, just FTR, Alabama came in first this year, surprising absolutely nobody, I guess. And that funny sound you hear from the upper East Coast is a bunch of Puritans spinning in their graves - dead last in Bible-mindedness was a tie between Providence, Rhode Island and New Bedford, Massachusetts.

The Bible Belt lived up to its name as Southern locales topped the American Bible Society (ABS) and Barna Group’s annual list of Bible-minded cities, with Birmingham, Alabama, earning the No. 1 spot.

The rankings, based on a city’s Bible reading habits and beliefs, come from a decade of interviews with more than 63,000 adults in the country's 100 largest metropolitan areas.

The 10 Most Bible-Minded Cities:

10. Little Rock, Arkansas
9. Greenville/Spartanburg, South Carolina/ Asheville
8. Charlotte, North Carolina
7. Jackson, Mississippi
6. Springfield, Missouri
5. Shreveport, Louisiana
4. Roanoke/Lynchburg, Virginia
3. Tri-Cities, Tennessee
2. Chattanooga, Tennessee
1. Birmingham, Alabama

And the 10 least:

91. New York
92. Phoenix, Arizona
93. Buffalo, New York
94. Hartford/New Haven, Connecticut
95. Las Vegas, Nevada
96. Cedar Rapids, Iowa
97. San Francisco
98. Boston, Massachusetts
99. Albany, New York
100. Providence, Rhode Island/ New Bedford, Massachusetts

http://www.christianitytoday.com/gleanings/2015/january/roll-tide-and-read-your-bible-alabama-ranks-no-1-for-script.html

[JNelson6563]

1. I suspect the 10 most "Bible-minded-cities"

translates into these 10 cities there is the most social pressure to claim to be bible-minded, whateverthefuck that even means.

The 10 least must mean no one gives any fucks about appearing religious.

Julie

[trotsky]

2. Cedar Rapids and Phoenix are the only ones that kind of stick out on the "least" list.

No surprises among any of the others on either list!

[Curmudgeoness]

3. Ugh, my sister just moved to the area of #3

and keeps trying to convince me to move down there too. Besides the reasons I already had not to want to live there, this is just another one. (But I sure would like to live closer to my sister, who does not believe in God either, but doesn't give a crap about the effects of religion on our lives.)

[Arugula Latte]

4. I'm a little bummed that Portland didn't make the "least" list.

The urban Northwest is supposed to be the least church-going part of the country.

[skepticscott]

5. An interesting measure that they didn't use

would have been sales of Bibles in different cities. More objective and less subject to people lying, though still not perfect, since many Bibles are given away.