Considering how much religious beliefs and spirituality affect American society, including legislation (e.g. same-sex marriage and abortion, pornography, etc.) I wanted to get some idea the variation in religiosity and spirituality there was across the country.
In that spirit I did chi-square goodness of fit comparisons for all the states. In this test a low chi-square value means very good agreement between the states in question, and a high chi-square value means that the states in question are very different from each other. Comparing a state to itself give a value of 0, and I used that idea to confirm that the formula used in the spread sheet was valid.
In total there were 1,275 comparisons between states, including the District of Columbia. Of these, the chi-square values ranged from 0.1025 for the Louisiana-South Carolina comparison to 63.7437 for the Vermont-Mississippi comparison.
This means that across the board there was very good agreement between South Carolina and Louisiana, and almost no agreement between Vermont and Mississippi.
Categories compared for each state were:
Belief in God
Frequency of prayer
Religious attendance
Importance of Religion
Belief in a soul or spirit
Belief in something spiritual beyond the natural world
belief in an afterlife
Feel the presence of something from beyond this world
Feelings of spiritual well-being
Spiritual activities
Consider self spiritual
Beginning with the Louisiana-South Carolina comparison, I calculated chi-squares for comparisons between Louisiana and all other states, and between South Carolina and all other states.
The result was that the lowest chi-squares for the comparisons to Louisiana and the comparisons to South Carolina were identical. Further comparisons for the states that showed up on both lists were done.
This analysis showed very little variation in chi-square values between the following states:
Oklahoma
Louisiana
Arkansas
Tennessee
Kentucky
Alabama
Georgia
South Carolina
North Carolina
Mississippi showed close agreement with some of these states, but showed diversity from others on the list.
Chi-square values for this set ranged from 0.1025 to 1.6868.
Chi-square values for comparisons to Mississippi range from 1.1545 to 4.8286.
Note that this kind of comparison says nothing about how religious or spiritual these states are, but rather how much diversity there is in religiosity+spirituality among these states.
The above links indicate that Mississippi is the most religious state, and the other states listed above are in the top 11,
Note that New Hampshire has the second highest chi-square with Mississippi, after Vermont, with chi-square=53.6570.
Looking at the stuff presented in the " Social characteristics of New Hampshire, comparisons to other states it becomes very apparent that the states listed above are always listed together in the rankings of other characteristics.
If these states were to secede as a unit, and form their own country, it might well be most cohesive country in the world. There would be little diversity of opinion (although some) and this country would present a unified population on almost any question.
This could be the basis for great strength.
Notice also that most of these states are maritime.
Having noted that Vermont and New Hampshire were the two states that had the highest chi-square values for any two-state comparison, I attempted to find other states with which they might be associated in a union that was the most counter to the southern bloc.
There were only three states that compared favorably… Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.
These three states compared well with Massachusetts, but Massachusetts was more closely aligned aligned with many other states than with these three.
These two blocs, the southern bloc and the New England bloc are polar opposites with respect to religiosity/spirituality, and I might say in many other ways as well.
These two blocs are made up of 13 states.