Spirituality can mean many different things to Americans. For instance, about a quarter of Americans say that, to them, being spiritual is about connections, including being connected to God, nature or other people. One-in-ten say being spiritual means understanding themselves.
We also know that for many people there is no difference been spirituality and religion.
Due to the wide variety of definitions people attach to spirituality – and since there is no single way to measure it – Pew Research Center’s 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study (RLS) asked Americans multiple questions about their spiritual beliefs, practices, experiences and identities.
The study shows that many of the country’s most spiritual states, as well as many of its most religious ones, are in the South. For instance, about half of adults who live in Mississippi (54%), Louisiana (51%), Kentucky (51%), Arkansas (50%), South Carolina (50%) and Oklahoma (50%) say they feel “a deep sense of spiritual peace and well-being” at least once a week.
But spirituality also is widespread outside the South. For example, roughly eight-in-ten or more adults in every state believe that people have souls or spirits in addition to their physical bodies. And roughly seven-in-ten or more in every state think there is “something spiritual beyond the natural world.”
When comparing states on any survey question, it’s important to keep in mind that some differences may not be statistically significant, due to the survey’s margins of error.
The charts below include shaded bars showing margins of sampling error at a 95% confidence level.
Related: Understanding error bars in charts
Select a spirituality measure from the dropdown list below to find out how your state stacks up with other places.
How religious is your state?
Explore our interactive database to find how religious adults are in your state based on service attendance, prayer, belief in God, and importance of religion.
Here are the questions used for this analysis, the topline and details about the survey’s methodology, including the sample sizes and margins of error for each state.
State-level trends in spirituality
State-level data from our previous Religious Landscape Studies (in 2007 and 2014) is accessible in the interactive RLS database. Some of the questions about spirituality in the new survey were also asked in the prior landscape studies. However, the 2023-24 data should not be directly compared with the previous landscape studies’ results due to changes in how the RLS was conducted.
More information about state-level trends over time is included in the footnotes of the interactive RLS database. The effect of changes in survey methods is described in Appendix A of the latest RLS report.
Acknowledgements
The 2023-24 RLS was made possible by The Pew Charitable Trusts, which received support from Lilly Endowment Inc., Templeton Religion Trust, The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations and the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust.
