A Recent Article About the State of Religiousity in CT

Poll Finds Many In State Unsure About God
By Elizabeth Hamilton
Hartford Courant Staff Writer
June 24, 2008


In the thorny business of measuring belief in God, Connecticut comes up a bit on the lukewarm side.

A poll released Monday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life shows that Connecticut (along with Rhode Island), though still home to many believers, ranks near the bottom of most indicators of religious fervor, compared with the rest of the United States.

When asked how many of us are "absolutely certain" we believe in God or a universal spirit, only 57 percent responded yes. Only the folks in New Hampshire and Vermont scored lower, at 54 percent.

Even the residents of Alaska, who pray less than we do and go to church less frequently, according to Pew, are more sure of God than we are, it seems. The national average for absolute belief was quite a bit higher, at 71 percent, although an additional 22 percent of those polled in Connecticut said they were "fairly certain" when it comes to God.

"It's Connecticut, man. I think low intensity is what one expects," said Mark Silk, founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College.

"It reminds me of the great line from Peter De Vries' book, 'Slouching Towards Kalamazoo,' which, if I have it right, went like this: 'About the only thing that's ever been converted in Connecticut is a barn.'"

So is there any consequence for all this ambivalence? Consider the next poll result:

In Mississippi, where 91 percent of those polled said they are certain there is a God, 46 percent also said they have their prayers answered at least once a month.

In Connecticut and Rhode Island, on the other hand, only 23 percent of us believe in monthly responses to prayer. (If it makes anyone feel any better, only 21 percent of the believers in Alaska report having their prayers answered every month).

Coincidence?

There's no connection, says the Rev. Ned Edwards, senior pastor of First Church of Christ in Farmington, who is more inclined to see the prayer request result as an indication of Yankee stoicism than as some consequence of not being devout enough.

"I would say our culture has a lot to do with it," Edwards said.

In other words, New Englanders might be more likely to believe in the power of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps than the power of prayer.

The Rev. Mark Pendleton, dean of Christ Church Cathedral in Hartford, agreed and said there are some ingrained cultural assumptions that influence poll results.

"You can't believe in miracles if you don't expect them to happen," Pendleton said. "The same is true for prayer."

The state-by-state comparison is included in a larger report, titled U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, which Pew released Monday. The findings from the wider survey show that a majority of Americans say religion is very important to them, and that there is widespread tolerance for other faiths.

The study was based on telephone interviews with more than 35,000 people from May 8 to Aug. 13, 2007.

The polls showing that Connecticut and other Northeastern states rank lower on measurements for belief, frequency of church attendance and prayer were not a huge surprise to people like Silk and Barry Kosmin, director of the Institute for the Study of Secularism and Culture at Trinity College.

Kosmin believes the results are, in part, a reflection of higher educational levels in the Northeast.

"You know the old saying, 'The more you know, the more you realize you don't know,'" Kosmin said.

Silk said the results reflect, in part at least, the decline in traditional urban Catholicism, "particularly the kind where people would have their ... medallions of St. Jude and are praying to their saints, looking for a response."

Pendleton, who has previously worked as an Episcopal priest in Florida and Maryland, said there is a noticeable difference between Southern and Northern states where religion is concerned.

"It was a church-friendlier atmosphere there," Pendleton said. "My wife and I talk about that, how it was easier to do church down there. But I have to admit that my progressive side feels a bit more at home here amid secular New England than in the religious South."

But the poll results mean little to Rabbi Joseph Eisenbach, who heads the orthodox Chabad Lubavitch of Northwest Connecticut.

For one thing, Eisenbach said, Jewish people are born into their religion — "they have a Jewish soul" — and don't have to practice their faith to identify with it, he said.

So measuring religiosity by worship attendance rather than, say, the good deeds one does for others, Eisenbach said, is a bit misleading.

"Godliness is found in every part of society," he said. "I find people in my little corner of the world are very spiritual."

Contact Elizabeth Hamilton at ehamilton@courant.com.

For a summary of the Pew Forum's findings and a link to the full report, visit www.courant.com/religion.