Page 10 | Wednesday June 19, 2013 NEWS OPINION CULTURE SPORTS

Study fi nds religion more important in South

Documentary to tell UA alumna Roberta Alison storyBy Reggie AllenContributing Writer

Bestselling author, film-maker and critically acclaimed sports writer Keith Dunnavant will film “Roberta – The First Lady of Southern Sports,” his newest documentary this sum-mer.

The film will focus on the story of Roberta Alison, an alumna of The University of Alabama, who was the first African-American at the University to receive an athletic scholarship.

Alison, who began her colle-giate tennis career after being scouted by the University’s ten-nis coach, not only played ten-nis for the Capstone but broke the gender barrier. Coach Jason Morton and Athletics Director Paul “ Bear” Bryant helped con-vince the SEC to allow Alison to join the all-men’s tennis team.

“Alison was a true pioneer who helped pave the way for the women’s sports landscape we know today, and, yet, her story is largely unknown, even at The University of Alabama,” Dunnavant said.

Dunnavant, a UA alumnus, wanted to tell a story that has not yet been told.

“In the early 1960s, when women’s sports did not exist in the SEC, or hardly anywhere, Alison was such a gifted ten-nis player, earned her way onto the men’s tennis team at The University of Alabama,” he said. “In the process, she became the first woman to earn an athletic scholarship in the SEC – a decade before Title IX.”

The project is being funded on Kickstarter, a funding plat-form for creative projects,

where Alison is quoted saying the sport is at the heart of her motivation.

“I didn’t go into it wanting to be a pioneer,” the late Alison said . “I just wanted to play tennis.”

Dunnavant said Alison was quite the contender. The ten-nis star received respect from many of the male players, and it wasn’t an uncommon occur-rence to have opponents drop out of matches against her to avoid losing to a woman.

Alison’s career ended at the peak of the open era where

professional tennis players were allowed to play with amateurs. After a loss at Wimbledon, Alison retired and moved back to her hometown of Alexander City, Ala., where she began a family and later died in 2009.

The tennis building at the University was dedicated to her in 2012. Though the building is a physical symbol of her lega-cy, Dunnavant said her story, which has the potential for being an inspiration for women, is still an unknown story.

“It has taken individuals with

talent, drive and determination to break down the barriers thatwe now take for granted. Alison was one such person, repre-sentative of so many others,” Dunnavant said.

Joseph Rinaldi, Dunnavant’s public relations agent of 10 years, has yet to see production for the film but said he is “sure it will be terrific.”

Filming for the documen-tary will not begin until some-time this summer and is set to be released in 2014. More information can be found on kickstarter.com.

By Angel CokerDesigner

Max Elefson doesn’t attend church in Tuscaloosa, Ala. He doesn’t attend church in his hometown of Princeton, N.J., except on holidays. He attended Catholic school at Princeton Academy of the Sacred Heart, and that was enough to satisfy his religious needs, his father said.

“We’re ‘Chreasters,’” Elefson said. His family only attends church on Christmas and Easter.

Before moving to Alabama, Elefson, a University of Alabama freshman, said he heard Tuscaloosa was in the Bible Belt and that people were very religious.

Elefson said his friends in Tuscaloosa are more likely to attend church than his home-town friends. Most of his friends in New Jersey attended church as children with their parents but don’t attend as adults on their own, he said. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life ranked Elefson’s state No. 30 in importance of religion.

The forum found that people of the South find religion of more importance than those

in the North. Mississippi and Alabama ranked as the top two while Vermont and New Hampshire came in at 46.

The Pew Forum ranked each state’s importance of religion based on frequency of prayer,

church attendance and belief in God. Data for each was extracted from more than 35,000 interviews with American adults during the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey of 2007. States with too-small sample sizes

were combined.Mississippi ranked No. 1 in

all criteria. Alabama ranked No. 5 for church attendance and No. 3 for frequency of prayer and belief in God, placing it at No. 2 for overall importance

of religion.Gallup posed the question

of how important religion is in people’s lives in more than 11,000 interviews in four years and found that age, gender, edu-cation and income play major roles. The results showed that religion is more important to women and older Americans and less important to people with higher educations and higher incomes.

The poll found that women were more likely to find religion important than men, with 66 per-cent of women citing its impor-tance compared to 51 percent of men. Religion also matters more to the older population than the younger, with less than 50 per-cent of Americans ages 18 to 29 reporting religion to be impor-tant and more than 70 percent ages 65 and older reporting reli-gion to be important.

Gender and age, however, do not qualify as reasons for New Hampshire and Vermont rank-ing lower than Mississippi and Alabama. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, each of these states’ populations are made up of about half men and half women, and percentages for ages 18 to 29 and 65 and older

are about the same.Education and income differ-

ences do appear to have some influence, however. People below the poverty level account for about 18 percent of Alabama’s population and about 22 percent of Mississippi’s population. Only 11 percent of the population in Vermont and New Hampshire is below poverty level. About 10 percent more of Vermont and New Hampshire’s populations have at least bachelor’s degrees, compared to Alabama and Mississippi’s populations.

The Rev. Jerry Smith of Tabernacle Free Will Baptist Church in Northport, Ala., said he agrees that income and education may be reasons the South ranks higher. He said he believes money and education have replaced the importance of worshipping God.

“Evangelicals depend upon God as our source,” Smith said.

Smith said much of it also has to do with the fact that there is more Catholicism in the North. He said the Evangelical Baptist movement settled more in the South in the pioneer days, and Baptists are more openly reli-gious than those of the Catholic faith.

CW | Stephanie McNealMississippi and Alabama top the list of which states value religion the most.