BIRMINGHAM, AL—As a candidate for United States Senate in Alabama, Roy Moore could easily be headed for victory in next week’s vote despite multiple accusations that he sexually molested underage girls, but studies show that while southern and other “Bible Belt” states have the highest rates of religious devotion, they also lead the country in porn consumption.
A 2016 Pew Research Institute Study found that Utah, at 64 percent, has the seventh-highest percentage of residents who describe themselves as “highly religious,” out of all 50 states. But in a Harvard University study, Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?, Utah actually led the nation in paid subscriptions to online porn sites, with 1.69 subscribers per 1,000 residents.
However, when it comes to the time spent on porn sites, Moore’s state of Alabama comes in second, according to stats compiled by the free porn mega-site PornHub. Alabaman porn viewers spent an average of 10 minutes and 48 seconds per visit to the porn site, trailing only neighboring Mississippi, at 11 minutes and eight seconds per PornHub visit in the 2016 data.
Perhaps not by coincidence, Mississippi and Alabama were tied in the Pew survey for the title of most religious state in the country, at 77 percent “highly religious.”
Mississippi’s neighbor on its western border, Arkansas—the fifth most “highly religious” state at 70 percent—tied for second place with Alabama in the PornHub stats for time spent watching porn, at an identical 10:48 per visit.
Interestingly, according to the Harvard study, states that had passed laws banning gay marriage prior to the 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide collectively had 11 percent more online porn consumers per capita than the other 33 states that had not expressly banned gay marriage.
Yet another study, published in 2014 in the academic journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, came up with similar findings, discovering that states with higher rates of religious devotion and politically conservative beliefs also show the highest rates of sexually-oriented keyword searches on Google.
“Across two separate years, and controlling for demographic variables, we observed moderate-to-large positive associations between greater proportions of state-level religiosity and general web searching for sexual content,” the study’s authors, from Canada’s Brock University and University of Toronto, wrote. “And greater proportions of state-level conservatism and image-specific searching for sex.”
Why do states that claim to be the most religious also show the most voracious appetites for porn?
"One natural hypothesis is something like repression: If you're told you can't have this, then you want it more," said Harvard study author Benjamin Edelman.
