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Religious Outlier

By CHARLES M. BLOW
Posted: September 5, 2010.

Print: New York Times

With all of the consternation about religion in this country, it’s sometimes easy to lose sight of just how anomalous our religiosity is in the world.

A Gallup report issued on Tuesday underscored just how out of line we are. Gallup surveyed people in more than 100 countries in 2009 and found that religiosity was highly correlated to poverty. Richer countries in general are less religious.

But that doesn’t hold true for the United States.

Sixty-five percent of Americans say that religion is an important part of their daily lives. That is compared with just 30 percent of the French, 27 percent of the British and 24 percent of the Japanese.

I used Gallup’s data to chart religiosity against gross domestic product per capita, and to group countries by their size and dominant religions.

The cliché goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words.”

Assuming that this holds true for charts, here is mine.

image

Comments (3)

Arrogant, gullible, infantile, ignorant, superstitious also come to mind.

posted on September 5, 2010
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It seems that Vietnam is also an outlier on the other end — a low income, low religion nation. Also, where is China? One would suspect it would appear in the lower left as well.  Very interesting infographic.

posted on September 7, 2010
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3. Brian from Texas

The line about the correlation between religiosity and poverty instantly reminded me of this old picture in a Mad Magazine from the 1970s. The subject was Catholic churches in Latin America. The picture depicted a church being literally constructed out of solid gold and the priests living like kings while the populace outside are starving in the street.

posted on September 15, 2010
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