As a devout atheist, I often catch myself making the assumption that religious people tend to be people with less education (actually, I usually put it in harsher terms than that but I’m being polite today.) What makes me think this is that I often see a lot more churches in states (or parts of states) in which I consider the population to be particularly dim. So I decided to do a sanity check to see if I was correct.

I created a map of the US showing High School graduation rates as a measure of intelligence (for lack of a national IQ map) and then I overlayed the areas in which the population was a religious majority. I did it on a state-by-state basis to make it easy for myself. Here is the fruit of my labor:

As you can see, I was close to being correct in my assumption, but not completely. There were several surprises, and some states were very close to call when I was averaging them. If I learned anything from this project, it was to stay the hell away from the center of the US! Stick to the edges, people - that’s my advise.

Here are the two source maps in case you are curious: