Religion and geography in the U.S.

Aleks pointed me toward this pretty picture.

I’d prefer colored dots rather than shading. (Ideal would be something like one dot per 10,000 people of each religion, or something like that, I think.) But still, it’s interesting. I’d like to see the one for each decade going back 100 years.

1 thought on “Religion and geography in the U.S.

  1. Very interesting picture, though potentially misleading. Since all Catholics are put under the same umbrella (despite being a notoriously heterogenous bunch) and protestants are split into many different categories (not sure what the category "Christian" means in this context) Catholics look far more ubiquitous and influential in the religious market than they really are.

    One thing this map reveals indirectly, is the degree of fractionalization of the protestant market share. Where ever a protestant denomination gets the lion's share of the local protestants, they "win" the county. Where a number of denominations "split" the protestant market, the Catholics APPEAR to dominate (but Protestants together could be getting the lion's share of the market and the apparetnly dominant Catholics could be getting as little as 10%).

    Attempts to measure pluralism in "religious economies" have been highly controversial and would benefit from the attention of some big guns from stats.

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