Barna, in partnership with the American Bible Society, has released their annual survey of America’s most “Bible-minded” cities. The report is based on thousands of interviews conducted over the course of many years, and as in the past, the results are interesting and a little provocative.

The survey defines a “Bible-minded” individual as someone who “report[s] reading the Bible in a typical week and who strongly assert[s] the Bible is accurate in the principles it teaches.” The American cities containing the most such individuals are predominately located in the South; those with the least are scattered around the country, but a cluster of the latter can be seen in New England. You can read the full results in infographic form here. Do the results surprise you? Is your hometown on the list?

The data is certainly interesting, and will likely provide good material for sermons and editorial articles in the weeks to come. However, I think the most insightful response to the report might be found in reflecting on what “Bible-mindedness” means, and how we might go about measuring it (if in fact it can be meaningfully measured). If you wanted to gauge the level of Bible engagement in a community or country, what criteria would you use to measure it? How well do you match the survey’s definition of “Bible-mindedness,” and do you think it provides an accurate picture of your relationship to Scripture right now?

We’ve written about this topic in the past, if you’re interested in exploring it further. In response to an earlier (2014) “Bible-minded cities” survey, we reflected on what it means to be “Bible-minded.” Several years ago, we also crunched BibleGateway.com usage data to find out which cities in the United States, Canada, and the UK and Australia did the most online Scripture reading. (Note that our data simply determined which cities accessed the Bible the most, and did not try to gauge readers’ intents or attitudes toward what they were reading—so while it makes for an interesting comparison to Barna’s data, it’s not measuring exactly the same thing.)