Religiosity and Income in the United States

Church attendance vs. income:

David noticed this article by Dan Mitchell reporting the well-known fact that people in richer countries tend to be less religious. What about states in the U.S.?

...here's a plot showing the correlation of religious attendance and individual income within each state. We get a separate correlation for each state, and so we can plot these. Here we plot the correlations vs. state income, using the same color scheme:



...there's quite a bit of variation from state to state, but overall we see a positive correlation between income and religiosity in poor states and a negative correlation in rich states: To put it another way, in Mississippi, the richer people attend church more. In Connecticut, the richer people attend church less.

(See also here for more on income and voting by state, and here for more on income, voting, and church attendance.)