Alabama is the most religious state? Why that might be changing

The “Go to Church or the Devil Will Get You” sign stands by a water wheel on I-65 north of Prattville.Joe Songer

Alabama is the most religious state in the nation, according to a new study released by the non-profit organization SmileHub.

The organization ranked Alabama first overall in importance of religion, 2nd in the share of adults who consider religion very important in their lives (after Mississippi), and fourth in the number of religious congregations per capita, and 11th in the number of religious studies degrees awarded per capita.

That’s consistent with other sources that perennially rank Alabama as one of the most religious states.

This analysis used 11 metrics and drew on data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Gallup, the U.S. Religion Census, the Public Religion Research Institute, American Values Atlas, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Geospatial Management Office, Google Trends, DataUSA, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Internal Revenue Service.

Nationwide, about 38 percent of adults consider religion very important in their lives.

In 2016, the Pew Research Center ranked Alabama and Mississippi as tied for the most religious state, with 77 percent of people saying in surveys they are “highly religious.”

Also in 2016, Gallup surveys showed Alabama slightly behind Mississippi as most religious, with Utah third.

Utah was settled by Mormons.

Baptists and Methodists helped build Alabama into a religious state.

Both started their first Alabama churches in 1808, then became fixtures in every town of any size in the state.

Since Alabama was founded in 1819, Baptists and Methodists have been the two largest denominations, exerting influence across culture.

Yet the 2020′s have been hard on Baptists, Methodists and other major denominations.

The Southern Baptist Convention just announced its lowest membership numbers since the 1970s, and the United Methodist Church in Alabama recently lost more than half of its churches in a split.

“They are struggling, but that’s a reflection of larger realities in an increasingly secular culture,” said retired Auburn University historian J. Wayne Flynt.

“So are all Christian denominations of any kind whatsoever,” Flynt said. “The pattern all through history is rural societies where people do not have power or control tend to be more religious. There are a lot of things in the human experience we do not control. You want to control something.”

Southern Baptists reached their peak of more than 16.3 million members in 2006, with more than a million in Alabama. That’s now under 13 million nationally and 753,653 members in 3,164 Southern Baptist-affiliated churches in Alabama.

United Methodists had been in a decades-long decline losing several million members from the 1968 through the 2020 pandemic before debates over whether to embrace LGBTQ rights finally split the church in 2022-23. The United Methodist General Conference that concluded May 3 voted to fully embrace same-sex marriage and ordination of LGBTQ clergy, reversing longstanding policy. A breakaway group, the Global Methodist Church, will maintain those prohibitions.

United Methodists have also been closing down many of their historic churches, such as Uniontown United Methodist Church.

Here are the top 10 most religious states, according to the SmileHub ranking: