Oregon Among Most Secular States In The Union

Saturday, February 21, 2015

Kai Soderberg, GoLocalPDX Contributor

Vinoth Chandar "play of light in Santhome church" (image cropped)

According to a just-released Gallup poll, Oregonians are one of the least church-going people in the United States.

At the other end of the spectrum, is the state of Utah. At 51 percent of its residency purporting to attend church at least once a week, leads the nation, closely followed by the Bible Belt states of the South.

With the Mormon faithful comprising over half of Utah religious affiliation, and the heavy population of Protestants and Blacks in the South, some of the findings were not surprising to survey authors.

As part of their "State of the States" series, Gallup asked 177,030 adults: “how often do you attend church, synagogue or mosque – at least once a week, almost every week, about once a month, seldom or never?”

The survey found that there are very few Oregonians in the pews, with only 24 percent of the state's residents reporting that they go to church on a weekly basis.

Much can be gathered from these polls, survey authors say. Church attendance informs how people feel about social issues, which translates to how they vote. Religious Americans tend to vote Republican and looking at the map of the polls more or less reflects a red and blue state political map of America.

Oregon has more than a twenty-percentage point discrepancy between the top ten states in church attendance. This remains just one of the factors that separates Oregon from other parts of the nation and there is no indication from this report that the trend will change anytime soon.

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