Which US States Are Most Religious? 2024 Pew Research Findings Revealed (2025)

Comparing states on key measures of religiousness

September 16, 2025

When comparing states, it’s important to keep in mind that some differences may not be statistically significant, due to the survey’s margins of error.

How we measured religiousness

This interactive site uses data from Pew Research Center’s 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study (RLS) to compare all 50 states and the District of Columbia on several measures of religiousness.

The RLS was conducted in English and Spanish from July 17, 2023, to March 4, 2024, among a nationally representative sample of 36,908 respondents. For more details, refer to the Methodology.

To gauge the religiousness of each state, we looked at four separate survey questions. We ranked each state by the percentage of its adult residents (ages 18 and older) who say they pray daily, believe in God or a universal spirit with absolute certainty, consider religion to be very important in their lives, and attend religious services at least once or twice a month.

Overall religiousness

We also combined these four questions into a scale of “overall religiousness” by assigning points to each survey respondent’s answers, as follows:

• Prayer frequency: 0 points for those who seldom or never pray, 2 for those who pray daily, and 1 for everyone else
• Belief in God or a universal spirit: 0 points for those who do not believe in God or a universal spirit, 2 for those who believe with absolute certainty, and 1 for everyone else
• Religion’s importance: 0 points for those who say religion is not too important or not at all important in their lives, 2 for those who say religion is very important in their lives, and 1 for everyone else
• Religious attendance: 0 points for those who say they seldom or never attend religious services, 2 for those who attend at least once a month, and 1 for everyone else

We added these indicators together, with total scores ranging from 0 (for people who scored 0 on all four measures) to 8 (for people who scored 2 points on each measure). We divided the public roughly into four groups (or “quartiles”), from least to most religious. Respondents who scored either 7 or 8 were categorized in the top quartile, which we classified as highly religious. We then ranked all 50 states and the District of Columbia by the percentage of residents who are in the highly religious category.

State-level trends in religiousness

State-level data from our previous Religious Landscape Studies (in 2007 and 2014) is accessible on the interactive RLS database. However, the newest data (from 2023-24) should not be directly compared with previous RLS results on some of these questions, due to changes in how the RLS was conducted. More information about state-level trends over time is included in the footnotes of the interactive RLS database. The effect of changes in survey methods is described in Appendix A of the latest RLS report.

Acknowledgements

The 2023-24 RLS was made possible by The Pew Charitable Trusts, which received support from Lilly Endowment Inc., Templeton Religion Trust, The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations and the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust.