How many South Carolinians believe in God? | McClatchy Washington Bureau

South Carolina is the fifth most religious state in the country, according to an analysis of Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study released this week. It is tied in that spot with Arkansas.

Nearly three-fourths of adults in South Carolina say they believe in God with “absolute certainty,” one of the highest percentages in the country, and only five percent say they do not. Almost half attend weekly worship services and 70 percent say they are “highly religious.”

Even so, these numbers show that South Carolina mirrors the national downward trend in the number of Americans who say that religion plays an important role in their life compared with the last study, in 2007. The number of South Carolinians who say they believe in God with absolute certainty has decreased 12 percent since 2007, with more switching to the less certain middle.

“The nones – the ones that say they’re atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular – are growing very rapidly as a share of the American population,” said Greg Smith, associate director of religion research at Pew. “The number has gone up seven points in seven years, across lots of different demographic groups – whites, blacks and Latinos.”

South Carolina and its neighbors have had the same jump in people saying they are religiously unaffiliated as other regions in the country, he said in an interview.

In South Carolina, this group has almost doubled since 2007, going from 10 percent to 19 percent of adults. In this same period of time, the percentage of South Carolinians identifying as evangelical Protestants has declined by 10 points.

“The South is still very distinctive in that is has more evangelicals and fewer religious nones, but the trends are still going in the same direction,” Smith said.

The Palmetto State remains solidly Christian, with only 3 percent of South Carolinians practicing non-Christian faiths. Evangelical Christians make up over a third of the population, most of them Baptist, more than mainline Protestant and historically black Protestant populations combined.

Evangelical Christians in South Carolina are 85 percent white, though the number of African-American and Hispanic evangelicals is increasing. White evangelicals make up an important voting bloc in South Carolina, which was highlighted in the state’s primary last month, the first among similar-leaning religious states in the South. And a small but growing number of South Carolina evangelicals are first- or second-generation immigrants, the study shows.

The data also revealed a large jump in the views of South Carolinian Christians when it comes to accepting homosexuality since the last study.

The view that homosexuality should be accepted grew from 37 percent in 2007 to 51 percent in 2014, placing South Carolina above most of its Southern neighbors. However, twice as many South Carolinians oppose gay marriage as those who support it.

“This distinction is one of the most interesting findings of this study,” Smith said. “On the one hand, acceptance of homosexuality has grown across the board in all religious groups. For example evangelicals are now 10 percent more likely to say homosexuality should be accepted by society, although they and Mormons are less accepting than Catholics, who are less accepting than the non-affiliated. But these are very, very consistent trends.”

The percentage of South Carolinian Christians who think abortion should be legal in all cases actually decreased by five percent since 2007.

“With abortion you see something very different, you see stability. These are the key twin social issues of our time. We think of these things as going together and that if you oppose one then you oppose the other, but we’re starting to see them become divorced,” Smith said.

He said the trend was likely due to the fact that South Carolinian Christians, like people across the country, are increasingly likely to personally know someone who is gay, whereas abortion does not change attitudes in that way.

Alabama and Mississippi are the most religious states in the country, and Massachusetts and New Hampshire round out the bottom of the list, based on the number of adults who are “highly religious” according to Pew.

The study bases religiosity on four factors: worship attendance, prayer frequency, belief in God and the self-described importance of religion in one's life.