How sinful is Alabama? Survey has surprising answer | GARY COSBY JR.
I get email from a wide variety of sources. Most of it gets trashed without opening, but this one caught my eye. Have you ever wondered what is the most sinful state in America? Frankly, I had never given it much thought, but your guess probably agrees with this list. Nevada, home of America’s gambling industry, is the most sinful state in the nation.
And Alabama, where did we rank? Surely, being in the middle of the Bible Belt and loaded with Christians, we must have done pretty well, right?
Sorry, Alabama comes out as the 14th most sinful state in America. Pastors, tsk, tsk, tsk, y’all got your work cut out for you. But how? How did such a heinous rank befall Alabama the Beautiful? Oh yeah, did we do better than Mississippi?
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Nope, sorry, Mississippi is more righteous than us by five spots. They rank as the 19th most sinful state. In fact, the entire Southeast really came out rather badly in this survey published by WalletHub. That’s pretty bad, considering the Southeast is traditionally the highest percentage of population claiming to be Christian.
This study, or survey, whatever you want to call it, looked at statistical indicators for Anger and Hatred, Jealousy, Excesses and Vices, Greed, Lust, Vanity, and Laziness. You can read all about how they came up with these rankings at https://wallethub.com/edu/most-sinful-states/46852
Perhaps most disturbing in Alabama’s ranking is the state ranks as the sixth most angry and hateful state. That’s bad, not surprising, not really, especially not if you could read some of the email I get, but bad. New Hampshire was the least hateful and angry state, so, if you can endure the winters up there, the folks must be pretty nice.
The hate index was very high across all Southern states. Arkansas was the most hateful state, Tennessee was next followed by South Carolina, Montana (not in the South but full to the brim of folks who live in end-of-the-world bunkers, or so I hear), Louisiana, Alabama, then a north of the Ohio River state in Illinois, Missouri, Alaska (also not south of anything except the North Pole) and finally our friends in Nevada round out the worst 10.
In fact, Alabama didn’t do better than 35th in anything. We were ranked 35th in Greed and in Vanity. Not bad. But, and this one is a surprise, I mean a genuine surprise, this survey found us to be the fourth most lazy state. That one caused me to scratch my head. Most everyone I know works pretty hard.
By the way, California leads the nation in lust. Louisiana is the national leader in Jealousy and in Excesses and Vice ― I know, it’s a shocker. Nevada is the greediest state and the laziest. New York is the nation’s leader in Vanity.
Who knows if this is even a legitimate study. Things like this crop up on the internet all the time. Everyone seems to like a good list, especially when that list is a ranking of some kind. Just think how we go nuts over the college sports rankings. This one probably doesn’t mean much of anything, but it at least gives you something to talk about around the metaphorical water cooler.
I am the son of a pastor and grew up in and around church and have been involved in church life for my entire time on planet Earth. You would think that kind of spiritual saturation would make positive changes in a culture. I’m sure it has. There is no empirical way to say how the absence of church life would have impacted life in the nation, but I am quite certain it would have been a negative impact.
What bothers me, and this has bothered me for many years, is that we tend to give lip service to spiritual matters rather than really permit the spiritual to have the impact and change upon the natural that God seems to have intended in the holy scriptures.
I am, as Paul once wrote, the chiefest of sinners in this matter. I look in the mirror and see a man plagued by problems that should have been crucified, buried, and left behind years ago. The same can be said for our society as a whole. We face problems in America today that should have been dealt with decades ago, yet they still rear their ugly heads almost daily.
The harsh truth is that the ills of society will remain as long as we turn away from them, ignore them, or do anything but confront them and fix them. Unfortunately, we have been a nation of New Year’s resolutionists. We swear we are going to fix things every year. Maybe we even begin working on them, but like a resolution to lose weight or work out more, we just decide its easier to do nothing and wait until next year to try again.
Gary Cosby Jr. is the photo editor of The Tuscaloosa News. Readers can email him at gary.cosby@tuscaloosanews.com.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: How sinful is Alabama? Survey has surprising answer | GARY COSBY JR.
