Every day at 6:30 a.m., Alvina Chow wakes up to read her Bible, meditating over the passages and praying for her family and friends.
Interspersed with her academic schedule, the second-year history student attends weekly Bible studies, Friday night meetings and small group leader training, topped with church on Sunday with her fellowship, Grace on Campus.
On the other side of campus, Kevin Longa, a second-year business economics student, spends his day relatively free from thinking about God.
A self-pronounced agnostic, Longa grew up with secular friends and family. While he said he feels there may be a greater purpose for each person, he did not find the answer to lie in God.
The two students represent two different choices in religious lifestyles captured in a recent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey.
The survey sampled over 35,000 people through random digit dialing, said Scott Clement, survey research analyst for Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
The poll used four indicators to measure the religious population of each state: the importance of religion in people’s lives, frequency of attendance at worship services, frequency of prayer and absolute certainty of belief in God.
The poll ranked California as the 35th most religious state in terms of respondents claiming that religion is an important part of their lives, with 48 percent agreeing to that claim. It was also 35th in worship attendance and did worse in the last two factors, frequency of prayer (36th) and belief in God (41st). Mississippi came in first on all measures, and New Hampshire and Vermont were frequently ranked at the bottom.
“The question of the importance of religion seems the most natural for religious commitment, but the other questions add a little depth to the analysis and show that religiosity is truly multi-faceted,” Clement said.
He found that Utah ranks 12th on the question of the importance of religion yet comes in 2nd in percentage of people who attend services on weekly basis.
He said the most surprising statistic was the rise of the religiously unaffiliated, which include atheists and agnostics, and which comprise 16.1 percent of the sample.
However, the survey may not show that Californians have a lack of spirituality, but rather an inclination to dissociate themselves from institutional forms of religiosity, said Jon R. Stone, a professor of religious studies at California State University, Long Beach.
“There’s a certain feeling in California that one doesn’t want to be tied to organized religion,’ he said. “I’ve seen that in my classes, students will use that phrase “˜I happen to be of a certain religion,’ as if it’s not their choice. Or they then correct the image by saying, “˜but I’m a spiritual person, not religious.”
Many Americans go through a life cycle in religion, being raised in church as a child, dropping out in their teens, searching for religion in college and returning to the church of their youth in order to raise their kids with religious values, he said.
“But if the Pew is saying that California is ranked 41st in belief in God, people are either not returning to the churches or looking for alternative forms of spirituality that doesn’t look in God, like Buddhism,” he said.
Stone added that the southern “Bible Belt” states may rank higher in religiosity because they more actively assert certain traditions, like support for heterosexual marriage, traditional roles for men and women, and patriotism or civic duty. He said people in California may also hold those views, but the role of religion reinforcing those beliefs is not as strong.
The importance of faith also varies by location in California, Stone said. Along the coast of California, people hold less association with religion, but in the Central Valley, religious activity more closely mirrors that seen in the “Bible Belt” states.
Chow said she believes many Californians are not as religious because they seek other ways to satisfy their sense of purpose.
“California’s known as the Golden State and people feel it’s a state of happiness, but there are people who look beyond that worldliness and realize that those things aren’t worth living for,” she said.
While religion isn’t a part of his focus now, Longa does not rule out that he may be drawn into faith in the future.
“I do believe that we are all spiritual beings and there might be a God that I may have to find out in the future,” he said. “It’s hard to be atheist; it’s almost pre-wired in our brains to come up with philosophical questions like what happens to us after death. And science can’t answer that.”