The Least Religious US States
Vermont sits at the bottom of the latest Pew Research Center rankings on state religiousness. Just 13 percent of Vermont adults are classified as highly religious. New Hampshire (15 percent) and Maine (17 percent) round out the bottom three. The figures come from Pew's 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study, a survey of 36,908 adults across all 50 states and the District of Columbia conducted between July 17, 2023 and March 4, 2024.
To qualify as highly religious in Pew's framework, a respondent has to score at the top of a four-question scale measuring prayer frequency, certainty of belief in God or a universal spirit, the importance of religion in their life, and frequency of religious service attendance. Thirty percent of all U.S. adults qualify by that standard. The most religious state, Mississippi, comes in at 50 percent. That is almost four times Vermont's rate.
The geography is consistent across the data. New England occupies five of the ten lowest spots, with Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, and Connecticut all in the bottom 10. The Pacific Northwest contributes Oregon. Nevada, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Iowa fill out the rest. The South dominates the other end: nine states above 40 percent highly religious, all of them either Southern or, in Utah's case, heavily Latter-day Saint.
How Pew Measures Religiousness
Pew assigns each respondent a score from 0 to 2 on each of the four questions, then sums the responses into a single 0-to-8 scale. Anyone scoring 7 or 8 is classified as highly religious. The national margin of error is plus or minus 0.8 percentage points. State-level margins are larger, between 2.4 points (California, with a sample of 3,746 respondents) and 8.1 points (Hawaii, with a sample of 348).
Margins matter when comparing states close to each other in the ranking. Hawaii at 21 percent and Iowa at 21 percent, for example, are statistically indistinguishable, as are several of the ties further up the table. The broad shape of the data, however, is not in question. A roughly 37-point gap separates Vermont from Mississippi, and the regional pattern repeats across all four survey questions individually as well as the combined scale.
One important caveat from Pew itself: the 2023-24 numbers should not be directly compared to results from the 2007 or 2014 Religious Landscape Studies on these particular questions. Pew changed survey methods between the studies, and the effect of those changes is described in Appendix A of the 2023-24 report. The ranking of states relative to one another has remained broadly stable, but the absolute percentages are on different scales.
The Ten Least Religious States
1. Vermont (13 Percent)
Vermont's 13 percent is the lowest in the country and below the District of Columbia (18 percent, not a state). Vermont also has the lowest share of adults reporting at least monthly religious service attendance: 17 percent, against a national figure of 33 percent. Forty-four percent of Vermont adults score in the lowest religiousness quartile (0 or 1 on the 0-to-8 scale), tied with New Hampshire for the highest share of low-religiousness residents anywhere in the country.
2. New Hampshire (15 Percent)
New Hampshire matches Vermont in the share of adults at the very bottom of the religiousness scale: 44 percent score 0 or 1 out of 8. The state is also one of the largest movers in religious unaffiliation since Pew's 2007 study. In 2007, 27 percent of New Hampshire respondents said they were not affiliated with organized religion. In the 2023-24 study, that share had risen to 48 percent, one of the largest increases in the country.
3. Maine (17 Percent)
Maine rounds out the New England trio at the bottom of the table. Forty percent of Maine adults are in the lowest religiousness quartile, third-highest in the country after Vermont and New Hampshire. Eighteen percent of Maine adults report monthly religious service attendance, against 33 percent nationally.
4. Nevada (19 Percent, Tied)
Nevada is the lowest-ranking state outside New England and the Pacific Northwest. Twenty-four percent of Nevada adults are in the lowest religiousness quartile, with another 34 percent in the medium-low quartile. The 19 percent highly religious figure ties Nevada with Oregon for fourth on this list.
4. Oregon (19 Percent, Tied)
Oregon's 19 percent is consistent with the broader Pacific Northwest pattern of religious decline. Forty-two percent of Oregon adults are in the lowest religiousness quartile, the second-highest share of any state.
6. Massachusetts (20 Percent)
Massachusetts, the state where the Puritan project began in the 1620s, is now the sixth-least-religious in the country. Thirty-seven percent of Massachusetts adults score in the lowest religiousness quartile. Pew identifies Massachusetts as one of the states with the largest growth in religious unaffiliation since 2007: from 17 percent then to 37 percent in the current survey, a 20-point jump.
7. Hawaii (21 Percent, Tied)
Hawaii's 21 percent ties it with Iowa. Hawaii has a relatively even distribution across the four quartiles, with no single religiousness band dominating. The state's large native Hawaiian, Filipino, Japanese, and Chinese populations contribute to a religious landscape that is more diverse than most of the mainland, with substantial Buddhist and traditional Hawaiian spiritual practice alongside Christianity.
7. Iowa (21 Percent, Tied)
Iowa is the lowest-ranking Midwestern state in the survey. Thirty-two percent of Iowa adults fall in the medium-low religiousness quartile, the largest single share of any quartile in the state. Iowa's appearance in the bottom 10 is the biggest geographical surprise in the rankings, since the Midwest as a region sits between the religious South and the secular Northeast and Pacific.
9. Rhode Island (22 Percent)
Rhode Island was founded in 1636 by Roger Williams, who had been expelled from the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony for his views on religious tolerance and the separation of church and state. Williams set up the colony as a refuge for religious dissenters, and the founding charter explicitly protected freedom of conscience. Nearly four centuries later, the state's high-religiousness rate sits well below the national average.
10. Connecticut (23 Percent)
Connecticut closes out the bottom 10. The state's distribution is one of the most evenly spread in the survey, with 27 percent of adults in the medium-low quartile and 31 percent in the lowest quartile. Connecticut was last in the top 10 in Pew's 2014 study at fifth place, so its position has moved very little over the past decade despite the larger methodological shifts.
What Has Changed Since The 2014 Study
The 2014 Religious Landscape Study put four New England states at the bottom of the table: New Hampshire and Massachusetts tied at 33 percent highly religious, Vermont and Maine tied at 34 percent. Those numbers cannot be read alongside the current 13-to-17 percent range, because Pew changed survey methods between studies. What can be said is that the ranking of states has been remarkably stable across three decades. New England has occupied the bottom 10 in every Pew survey, and the South has occupied the top.
What has changed at the national level: the religiously unaffiliated share of the U.S. adult population has stabilized. For the first time in decades, Pew finds the unaffiliated share essentially unchanged since 2019, at 29 percent. The Christian share of the population (62 percent) has also stabilized after years of decline. Pew notes that the leveling-off may be temporary, since younger adults remain markedly less religious than older ones: 35 percent of U.S. adults have switched religions since childhood, with net gains for the unaffiliated and net losses for Christianity.
Seven states (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Utah, Wisconsin, Missouri, Montana, and Pennsylvania) showed the largest growth in religious unaffiliation between 2007 and 2024. The biggest single jump was in New Hampshire (27 percent to 48 percent unaffiliated), followed by Massachusetts (17 percent to 37 percent). Utah's jump (16 percent to 34 percent) is notable for a state that remains heavily Latter-day Saint.
All 50 States Ranked By Religiousness
The table below ranks all 50 states by the percentage of adults Pew classifies as highly religious. Lower percentages indicate less religious states. Ties share a rank. The District of Columbia, which is not a state, would slot in at 18 percent, between Maine and Nevada or Oregon.
| Rank | State | % Highly Religious |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Vermont | 13% |
| 2 | New Hampshire | 15% |
| 3 | Maine | 17% |
| 4 | Nevada | 19% |
| 4 | Oregon | 19% |
| 6 | Massachusetts | 20% |
| 7 | Hawaii | 21% |
| 7 | Iowa | 21% |
| 9 | Rhode Island | 22% |
| 10 | Connecticut | 23% |
| 11 | California | 24% |
| 11 | Colorado | 24% |
| 13 | New York | 25% |
| 13 | Washington | 25% |
| 15 | Alaska | 26% |
| 15 | Pennsylvania | 26% |
| 17 | Arizona | 27% |
| 17 | Maryland | 27% |
| 17 | Minnesota | 27% |
| 17 | Wisconsin | 27% |
| 21 | Ohio | 28% |
| 22 | Delaware | 29% |
| 22 | New Jersey | 29% |
| 22 | West Virginia | 29% |
| 25 | Florida | 30% |
| 25 | Michigan | 30% |
| 25 | Nebraska | 30% |
| 28 | Illinois | 31% |
| 28 | Wyoming | 31% |
| 30 | Missouri | 33% |
| 30 | Montana | 33% |
| 32 | New Mexico | 34% |
| 33 | Virginia | 35% |
| 34 | Indiana | 36% |
| 34 | Texas | 36% |
| 36 | Idaho | 37% |
| 36 | Kentucky | 37% |
| 38 | Georgia | 38% |
| 38 | Kansas | 38% |
| 38 | North Dakota | 38% |
| 38 | Oklahoma | 38% |
| 42 | Alabama | 40% |
| 42 | Arkansas | 40% |
| 44 | North Carolina | 41% |
| 45 | Utah | 42% |
| 46 | Tennessee | 44% |
| 47 | Louisiana | 45% |
| 47 | South Dakota | 45% |
| 49 | South Carolina | 46% |
| 50 | Mississippi | 50% |
Source: Pew Research Center, 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study. Survey conducted July 17, 2023 to March 4, 2024, among a nationally representative sample of 36,908 U.S. adults. National margin of error is plus or minus 0.8 percentage points; state-level margins range from plus or minus 2.4 to plus or minus 8.1 points.
