...though I should hasten to add that given the range of attitudes among American Catholics today, even that has complex and sometimes contradictory effects.
As I said back when people were talking about the maps showing concentrations of people with church affiliations, the religious-secular divide in America doesn't even fall reliably among red state/blue state lines; it's a lot more complicated than that. The middle of the continent tends to be very religious, but that includes liberal Lutherans in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and super-conservative Protestants in Nebraska, and Mexican-American Catholic Democrats in southern Texas. The Northeast has a lot of Catholics; the Southeast is more secular than you think, but religious life there is overwhelmingly dominated by right-wing evangelical, Pentecostal and fundamentalist churches. And the Sagebrush Rebellion area, the libertarian-Republican West between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, is actually pretty secular except for the heavily Mormon areas in Utah and Idaho.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Re: Interesting
Date: 2006-07-27 02:27 am (UTC)As I said back when people were talking about the maps showing concentrations of people with church affiliations, the religious-secular divide in America doesn't even fall reliably among red state/blue state lines; it's a lot more complicated than that. The middle of the continent tends to be very religious, but that includes liberal Lutherans in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and super-conservative Protestants in Nebraska, and Mexican-American Catholic Democrats in southern Texas. The Northeast has a lot of Catholics; the Southeast is more secular than you think, but religious life there is overwhelmingly dominated by right-wing evangelical, Pentecostal and fundamentalist churches. And the Sagebrush Rebellion area, the libertarian-Republican West between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, is actually pretty secular except for the heavily Mormon areas in Utah and Idaho.