The former. I'm speculating this tendency to rely on hope for serious problems while relying on science for small ones creates compartmentalization, which impairs rationality and increases religiosity.
The correlation between poverty and religiosity is obvious, this is just a speculative direction of causation. Irrationality would probably lead to poverty, but if poverty also led to irrationality, the two causations would reinforce each other and explain the robustness of the correlation.
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