There’s nothing new in Gallup’s new survey of church attendance by state, showing weekly attenders to range from 63 percent in Mississippi to 23 percent in Vermont. This is the classic Bible Belt-cum-Bible Suspender, stretching across the South and up the Plains to the Canadian border at the high end and with the Northeast and the West (always excepting Utah) at the low end. The national average of 41.6 percent weekly attenders, again, hews closely to the 40 percent mark that has been Gallup’s constant finding (give or take a couple of points) ever since it began asking the question in the 1940s.

The problem is, as Gallup now from time to time acknowledges, the number is not an accurate indicator of reality. Close studies of actual (as opposed to self-reported) attendance put the current number of weekly attenders in the mid-twenty-percent range. It’s a typical case of people “over-reporting” their good behavior, seen in self-reported voting behavior as well as church-going. The evidence is that Americans over-report now more than they did half a century ago.