The religion maps

[mmcirvin]

Here is a set of maps of religious affiliation in the United States by county. (Michael Bacon says that they're "all over the blogosphere", but I guess I'm not as much on the ball as he is, since I just saw them now.)

Anyway, the maps are not so surprising except for the first one, which is extremely surprising if you imagine that American organized religiosity falls along red state/blue state lines, because it doesn't. There's basically a belt of heavy religious affiliation running north-south through the middle of the country from North Dakota to Texas, and a big unsurprising splotch of Mormons in Utah and eastern Idaho (though the rest of the Great Basin is pretty secular); but mildly liberal Minnesota and swing-state Missouri are about as religious as heavily Republican Nebraska, and Massachusetts far more so than Pat Robertson's stomping grounds in Tidewater Virginia! What's going on? Where did the Southeastern Bible Belt go?

I think Bacon's got it basically right: it's all about the dominance of different churches. In the Southeast, the Southern Baptists overwhelmingly dominate religious discourse and consequently are very powerful in spite of the overall moderate degree of religious practice. In most of the rest of the country, Catholics have a plurality, though in most places that's a mild illusion: Protestants are probably the majority, but are fragmented into different denominations. In the Northeast, the Catholics have a particularly strong presence (and generally have values that don't comfortably fall into American liberal/conservative categories), but there's a lot of other stuff going on too; around Boston there's a lot of activity in the extremely liberal UU and UCC churches, for instance.

I also think it's interesting that that actual Bible Belt running north/south through the middle is not made up of any one particular church; it's Lutherans up north, Southern Baptists in Oklahoma and Texas, and Catholics nearer the Mexican border.

Comments

[pompe.livejournal.com]

Hmm. The data is based upon what the _churches_ reported, not what citizens said or what observers counted. I wonder if that might make a difference and if that difference might be more pronounced in different parts of the nation.

I must say these numbers do seem extraordinarily high even accounting for what I as a foreigner would interpret as the distinct American religiousity so I wonder what they count as "adherents".* More than 75% of the population in some zones which must include sick, old, very young, people away from home, and just non-believers. More than 50% in what must be major cities.

As a Scando-atheist I also see that my completely prejudiced like of the Pacific Northwest is strengthened by the light color of that area... ,-)

*I'll give a local example of how weird numbers can be. Sweden is often in stats reported as being what, 80-90% Lutheran faith. That's a joke, because it is based upon how many people are members of the church, something you basically was by birth not long ago. It certainly does not mean 90% of Swedes 1) go to church or 2) believe in the Lutheran faith. Lots of people not believing in Lutheran Christianity has simply not bothered to leave or they like the church in their village and some of the stuff the church does, or they want to be able to marry for free. But they are not Lutherans or in many cases even believers in any sort of Christianity. Actual church-going rates are much lower, and even more so if you discount people who go to church by tradition twice a year at Christmas and Easter.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Maybe. I know that a lot of churches have the dynamic where disaffected ex- or quasi-members complain that their beliefs aren't accepted as those of proper church members, yet the church continues to count them as adherents when it comes time to cite numbers.

Countries with some sort of established church, or a church that is in some sense the default, get a lot of the phenomenon you describe in which a lot of people are sort of nominal members but never darken the church door. Here, I mostly hear it with secular Catholics and Jews, who tend to regard their religion as akin to or part of an ethnic category: something you are rather than something you believe. These people probably get counted as Catholics and Jews in statistics, because they were born that way, but they're not particularly religious.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...And, actually, come to think of it, I've heard a few secular Muslims talk the same way too.

[pompe.livejournal.com]

Yeah, almost all my Jewish friends and at least half of the "Muslim" ones - don't know if they'd always like that categorization themselves - are non-religious. No faith (or at least no faith matching the organized religion), just tradition and a rather small piece of that tradition-identity too.

On the other hand, I guess religious concepts in a way stick and shape society and citizens regardless of their faith. I'm a fourth-generation atheist but I suspect I do have some Lutheran concepts shaping me and guiding me. Atheist Protestant?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That reminds me of a story a while back about somebody visiting Northern Ireland who kept getting asked if he was a Protestant or a Catholic. He said he was an atheist and was immediately asked if he was a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist.

Though I was basically raised nonreligious (my parents sent me to Sunday school once or twice when I was a wee tot, I asked a lot of embarrassing questions, and they were pretty much lapsed anyway so they decided it was a bad idea), I figure the Yankee Baptist concepts of Soul Freedom and the Priesthood of Every Believer are ingrained somewhere deep in my brain firmware. You can try to figure out on your own whether that is inherently paradoxical or not.

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

As a Scando-atheist I also see that my completely prejudiced like of the Pacific Northwest is strengthened by the light color of that area

You wouldn't be the first, considering how many people of Scandinavian descent we have around here. :)

I work for a Lutheran educational institution in the region, and a highly liberal one. It's definitely a religious school, but does not require students or most employees to be Lutheran or even Christian (there are some obvious exceptions, such as the institutional pastor).

Chas Clifton's comment is interesting, but I think the omission he mentions may be explained by "the distribution of the larger and more regionally concentrated church bodies" characteristic of the source information. My own religion is too small, too weird, and too fragmented to be included, which is fine with me.