Mississippi found most spiritual, not Utah

According to a Pew Forum survey, Utah isn't the most spiritually-minded state in the nation.

Neither is Irish Catholic Massachusetts nor Hispanic Catholic New Mexico.

The most religious state is Mississippi.

The South, it seems, is the hotbed of salvation seekers.

Author Wallace Stegner once said the South produced soulful writers because the people were still trying to repent for the great sin of slavery. Guilt drove them to great literature.

Perhaps it also drives them to great piety.

White people seek to repent of discrimination.

Black people seek to be rescued from it.

And they both do their seeking on Sundays in church.

Whether it's fair or not, Mississippi always gives an impression of being a place of hard knocks and misfortune.

Every state has an image.

California is the land of self-indulgence.

Vermont? The land of the tidy.

And Mississippi will forever be the land of the blues.

Robert Johnson, the father of the blues, rose from the Delta there to sing of longing. The feelings in his music still bedevil people in Mississippi today. Economic woes, weather woes, segregation woes can make people feel forlorn. And despair can drive a person to drink. It can also drive them to deity. It can awaken inside the heart a spiritual hunger and a thirst for salvation.

It's black-letter Book of Mormon theology:

"He beheld with great joy; for he beheld that their afflictions had truly humbled them and that they were in a preparation to hear the word." (Alma 32)

In the traditional spirituals sung by Southern choirs, the Mississippi River is the the Jordan River, and people find themselves on the wrong side of it.

They sing:

Deep River, my home is over Jordan.

I long to cross over. . .

They sing:

I looked over Jordan and what did I see?

A band of angels coming after me.

When life gives people lemons, not everyone makes lemonade. Some dream of the sweet fruits available in heaven.

When life knocks them to their knees, they start to pray.

So, it would seem, with many spiritually-minded souls of Mississippi.

Even those who have licked poverty and pulled themselves up will hold on to faith.

"Poor Mexico," runs a saying. "So close to the United States and so far from God."

Mississippi might turn that notion on its head.

"Mississippi, so far from other states, but — happily — so close to God."

e-mail: jerjohn@desnews.com