Religious conservatives in the Bible Belt search for online porn more than anyone else according to a new study published earlier this month.

The new study, published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior and produced by researchers from Canadian Universities, found that American states with more religious conservatives search more for sexual content on Google.

Researchers used Google Trends to analyze porn searches while linking state level information from Gallup polls asking about religious and political attitudes together with a variety of sex and porn-related search terms.

The following is an excerpt from the study’s Abstract:

(researchers) examined associations between state-level religiosity/conservatism and anonymized interest in searching for sexual content online using Google Trends (which calculates within-state search volumes for search terms). Across two separate years, and controlling for demographic variables, we observed moderate-to-large positive associations between: (1) greater proportions of state-level religiosity and general web searching for sexual content and (2) greater proportions of state-level conservatism and image-specific searching for sex.

While researchers caution that aggregate data can’t be used to draw conclusions about individual religious conservatives, there does seem to be a strong correlation between religious conservatives and the consumption of pornography.

For example, the Daily Beast reports:

Earlier this year, Homegrown Video announced the results of a six-month study on amateur porn demographics. Just under a third of all homemade sex tape submissions were created in the “Bible Belt”. Perhaps even more surprising is the increased female involvement. According to Homegrown Video owner Farrell Timlake, women are now submitting their own videos almost as much as men. Mind you these are not porn stars, just regular folks at home who film themselves for the world to see. But perhaps even more interesting is the type of user-generated content coming from areas of the country some consider repressed. ‘We get so many interracial tapes from states that people would stereotype as being racially bigoted areas,’ says Timlake. ‘And that plays into the same thing: the more repressed it is, the more taboo it is, the more somebody is going to want to see it or touch that fire.’

In addition to the Homegrown Video study, numbers released last spring by Pornhub, one of the world’s biggest porn sites, indicates that folks in the Bible Belt watch more gay pornography than anywhere else in the nation:

… the majority of states with a high percentage of gay viewers is in the South. According to the numbers, Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia lead the South in gay porn consumption, and the state with the highest percentage of gay porn viewers in the nation is Mississippi at 5.6%.

In concluding the study’s Abstract, the Canadian researchers offer “the paradoxical hypothesis that a greater preponderance of right-leaning ideologies is associated with greater preoccupation with sexual content in private internet activity.”

While one can only speculate as to why there is such a strong connection between the consumption of porn and professed conservative Christian values, multiple reports indicate similar findings concerning the Bible Belt’s apparent voracious appetite for pornography.