Mapping American Churches

For All the Rest of Y’all

For Reformation Day, I made some maps of major Reformation-origin movements in America. Y’all seemed to like them. So I figured I would map out other groups too, to see if there are any interesting or surprising trends. To reiterate, this is all from the U.S. Census of Religious Bodies of 2010, an organization-based Census carried out by private statisticians and religious groups, not the U.S. government.

Pre-Reformation Origin Bodies

To start with, let’s step back before the Reformation. Let’s look at Roman Catholicism. Here’s a map:

Surprise surprise, not a lot of Catholics in the south. But more broadly, this map shows arguably 4 quite distinct groups of Catholics. Along the southwest border and in Florida, we have Hispanic Catholics. In Louisiana, we’re seeing the legacy of French rule and the local Cajun culture. In New England, that’s the Irish and Italians. And in the midwest, that’s German Catholic immigrants. So what looks like a singular trend typified by Catholic absence from the south is really a series of different trends, though of course southern anti-Catholicism certainly has a role to play as well.

Total Catholic church attendance as I have estimated it comes to at least 15 million people: more than all of my 5 Reformation Church branches combined. So I have to say, in America, it seems Catholicism may be winning the Reformation, at least in demographic terms!

Next up, let’s turn to the Orthodox. Because they’re a very small population overall, I combine all the national Orthodox churches, the Oriental churches, the Coptic churches, and basically anybody who isn’t descended from the western half of the Great Schism into one group, “Eastern” churches.

It kind of blew my mind how rare Eastern Christians are in America. I personally know at least four people who attend Eastern churches; I did not realize how weird my experience was. I have to set the scale to max out at just 1% to get even the faded map you see here, and that includes 22 different Eastern church bodies. The largest are the Greek, Coptic, Antiochan, and OCA bodies, but church attendance in every Eastern church in America only adds up to about 300,000 people. In other words, smaller than Anabaptists. There are more Amish/Mennonite/Brethren Americans than there are Eastern ones. Of course, Eastern Christians are clustered in urban areas, where they are diluted as a share of population, whereas the Anabaptists are in dense, rural communities, so their map presence is much bigger.

Other Abrahamic-Descended Faiths

Before I turn to later Protestant bodies, let me cover religions outside the Christian mainstream. We’ll start with Islam. The Religion Census does not break out by type of Islam, so it’s just Muslims of any kind here.

Muslim attendance has no strong regional pattern, with isolated counties showing high attendance. I suspect that this is because Muslim immigration is more recent, so there are no “legacy Mosques” out in the countryside as a result of historic rurality, and also because most Muslim immigration is educational migration, so college-town counties show up in a lot of these. The estimated number of Muslims who attend prayer on a given Friday is about 740,000, so just a bit below the size of the Anglican communities in America.

I’ll be frank: that sort of blows my mind. Comparing estimated Muslim attendance to Anglican, Lutheran, or Reformed suggests that these aren’t orders of magnitude different. Since 2010, Anglicans have declined and Muslims have grown, so there are probably more practicing Muslims in America now than Anglicans/Episcopals, and if current trends in national adherency continue, practicing Muslims would outnumber practicing Lutherans within 30–40 years. That is a much larger Muslim population than I had in my head. Hopefully that means fewer people die from drunk driving.

Next up: Judaism!

As you can see, Judaism is very regionally concentrated, in terms of actual attendance, in the northeast, with smaller hubs in south Florida and Pacific coast. I’ll admit, this is a much smaller footprint for Judaism than I expected. And given that my sample only maps out 166,000 Jewish attendees, I suspect it may be a sampling problem. On the other hand, a large number of self-identifying Jewish people are non-practicing, so it makes sense that my attendance-based figures might greatly understand the cultural prominence of Judaism. For reference, on this attendance estimate, practicing Jews are already much less common in America than practicing Muslims. But in terms of total adherency, the story flips: America has over 6 million Jews versus under 4 million Muslims. Logically, then, the implication here is that Muslims are vastly more likely to be “attending” religious services than Jews.

This exposes an interesting question: does religious identification matter more, or religious practice? My bias is towards religious practice, so that’s what I use, but there are times where identification matters more. So this data should not be taken to suggest that Judaism is already smaller than Islam in America: their relative sizes flip depending on what metric you use, and different metrics will be appropriate for different questions.

From Judaism, we can turn to some of the religious groups that have broken away from orthodox (Trinitarian) Christianity. Unitarians, Quakers, Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses all fall into this broad family. We’ll start with Mormons.

Mormons, unsurprisingly, have a very tell-tale geographic footprint, particularly around Utah. This is partly because they are concentrated there, parly because Mormon church attendees are one of the more numerous single groups I’ve assembled (1.6 million), and partly because a lot of those western counties are low-population areas. But on the whole Mormons have one of the most distinctive geographic patterns of any group, much like Lutherans, a group they will rival in size within a decade or two if current trends continue.

Next, we’ll look at Jehovah’s Witnesses.

We can see a huge contrast between Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, with Jehovah’s Witnesses having virtually no regional concentration whatsoever. They are fairly evenly spread through the whole country, with slightly denser populations in the old cotton belt, east-central Appalachia, and some of the Northwest, but, overall, very little regional pattern. On the whole, I count about 300,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses, making them comparable in scale to Anabaptists, Muslims, or Jews.

Next, I’ll turn to the “other” category for these groups, including Quakers, Spiritualists, Christian Scientists, and Unitarians.

This group is very small, with under 250,000 regular attendees among all its various bodies, and they are distributed fairly widely, but with distinct clusters. Quakers in Pennsylvania and the midwest, Unitarians in New England, Christian Scientists in the west, etc. By and large, this group is also shrinking over time.

Non-Abrahamic Religions

Next up, I’ve got the non-Abrahamic faiths: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, Shintoism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, and Baha’i. For convenience, I will map these as Hinduism, Buddhism+Jainism, Sikhism, and Tao+Shinto+Zoroastrianism+Baha’i. We’ll start with Hinduism.

Like Islam, Hinduism is largely composed of recent immigrants, and thus its distribution doesn’t have much legacy rurality, and is focused on recent immigrant destinations. However, Hinduism has a stronger coastal bias than Islam seemed to have. Like my “other” category above, Hindus are neither numerous nor highly concentrated, and as such I have to use a very small scale, maxing at just 0.5%, to make the roughly 200,000 regular Hindu worshippers show up on the map.

Next up, Buddhism and Jainism!

Buddhism and Jainism’s roughly 500,000 combined worshippers have a very similar distribution as Hinduism has, particularly concentrated along the coasts. Again, this reflects recent immigration patterns, though the larger presence of a more long-standing Chinese population among Buddhists probably accounts for the greater Buddhist share in non-urban-core counties.

But before we turn to China, let’s finish up the Indian subcontinent with Sikhism, AKA, “If Lyman wasn’t a Christian he thinks it would be kind of nifty to be this religion” AKA “Group most likely to be discriminated against on the basis of mistaken religious identity.”

Sikhs are, again, very similar to other groups from India in terms of their regional distribution. They are slightly more concentrated than others, perhaps due to strong Sikh emphasis on community, and thus despite numbering under 200,000 regular worshippers, they still show up pretty visibly in many counties, especially in California.

Next up, Taoism, Shintoism, Zoroastrianism, and Baha’i!

Of the 100,000 religious attendees who fall into this category, 85,000 are Baha’i, making it by far the largest group included. What’s most interesting to not to me is the broadly higher rate for these groups west of the rocky mountains, the clusters in South Dakota, and the big Baha’i cluster in South Carolina. These trends are odd; I suppose there must be a big historic Baha’i immigrant group in South Carolina… but I would not have guessed that the center of American Baha’ism would be inland South Carolina.

So that wraps up our non-Christian religions. Let’s return to Christendom now, and explore some major denominational families.

Old Protestant Denominations

Let’s try to move chronologically as best we can. I’ve discussed the various Reformation churches in my previous post. But let’s move forward from there: who comes next?

Well, it’s got to be the Congregationalists. Arguably, I should have included Congregationalism in my estimate of Reformed churches… but I made a judgement call, and did not. Congregationalism is descended from the Calvinist, Reformed tradition, but is more defined by its organization (loosely independent congregations) than its theological distinctives. Historically, it was big in Scotland and New England. So where is Congregationalism big?

Congregationalist churches turn out to have a neat geography. There are basically three main clusters. The first is the old New England congregationalist establishment, which stops dead at the New York border, except way north in New York where Vermonters broke through and settled the western fringes of the Empire state. Then we get the midwest cluster, from Pennsylvania to eastern Washington, reflecting migration out of New England, the absorption of some German pietist denominations, and Americanization of immigrants, as well as missionary efforts in the region. The third group is what we might call Scottish or Scots-Irish congregationalism, which you can see in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and North Georgia. Altogether, Congregationalism can count a bit under 500,000 church attendees… meaning the ancient faith of New England has fewer adherents than Islam, Mormonism, or Buddhism.

The next set of movements are arguably the Pietists and Methodists. We’ll start with the Pietist churches descended from the European free church movement. But crucially, I am excluding explicitly Anabaptist churches. To see the full heritage of Pietism, you’d need to include most of the Anabaptist and Moravian communities as well. Pietism was defined by a desire to reinvigorate staid European churches with genuine piety; they were seen as washed out, corrupt, and fixated on ritual. Pietists called for a new commitment to personal piety and a radical simplification of worship.

This map has a lot of overlap with Lutheranism and with Anabaptists, because Pietism largely sprang out of Lutheran and Anabaptist movements. I’ll admit I was actually very surprised by how big the Pietist population turns out to be: nearly 800,000 parishioners, so comparable to Anglicanism. I really thought Pietism was a much smaller movement. But with a handful of good-sized denominations descended from dissenting movements in European churches, they end up pretty well-represented, especially in the Midwest.

Next, we’ll jump to our first historically black denominations, historically black Methodists! Methodists inherited much of the Pietist tradition, though were not directly associated with Continental Pietism, even though their complaints with the Church of England, which they broke from, were very similar to formal Pietist complaints with Lutheran and Reformed churches.

Surprise surprise, these denominations are most prevalent in the former cotton- and rice-growing regions of the south. Now, I should make a note here about data. Some denominations in this project report attendance. Some report attendance for only some churches. Some report adherency, but not attendance. Some don’t even report adherency, just county-number of congregations. When data is missing, I impute it: I find demographically similar denominations that have complete data, and impute attendees from published adherency or congregational density. This means many of my estimates really are just that, “estimates.” In most cases, my methods should be uncontroversial. But for historically black churches, my method is sort of a gauntlet thrown down. Historically black churches egregiously overstate their membership. This shows up in direct surveys of individuals, but it really shows up in the religion census data, because in each of my three denominations in this specific sample, some churches report attendance, some do not, but all report adherency. Let’s take the African Methodist Episcopal church as an example, as it claims to be the largest of the three, with 1 million adherents. Restricting to churches that also report their attendees, it falls to 832,000. For that 832,000, there are 234,000 attendees, for a roughly 28% attendance rate. This is way on the low end: most denominations have attendance rates of 30% or higher, and many reach into the 50% or 60%. In other words, the historically black churches keep members on the rolls long after they’ve stopped attending, a trait shared with some Mainline churches like the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. All totaled up, I estimate there are under 400,000 regular attendees of Historically Black Methodist churches in America.

But what about “historically white” Methodists? (Sidenote: it’s icky to me that these race categories are still a thing. Can’t we find some way to have racial union?)

Okay, now that’s a big crowd! It’s hard to describe any single region as a Methodist stronghold other than perhaps the Great Plains, but there are many sporadic regions of strength. Methodists seem to have most dominant presence in the Great Plains, the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake, northern and eastern Appalachia, and parts of the cotton belt. But what’s most interesting to me are the places where Methodism is not strong: the most mountainous interior of Appalachia, the swathe from Missouri to Okalahoma, New England, Louisiana, and, of course, anything west of the Rockies. Apparently Methodism doesn’t do well with mountains.

I don’t have a good explanation for these trends… but I would suggest that if you want to a prominent denominational family that roughly-equally typifies all of middle America with minimal ethnic baggage and a theology clearly compatible with mainstream American ideology, well, you can’t do much better than Methodism. That is to say, I suspect a fair amount of what we’re seeing here is that traditional American values just jive really well with Methodist theology, which is why Methodism is one of the largest denominational families in America, with 3.2 million regular worshipers, alongside of course the 400,000 in the historically black denominations.

So who comes after the Methodists and Pietists? Why, the Baptists, of course! Baptists mostly originated from the Church of England as well, although they were influenced by Reformed and Anabaptist theologies as well. Today, Baptists are the best-known denomination which simultaneously rejects infant baptism, holds a symbolic view of the sacraments, and confesses a Calvinist theory of human will and the Atonement. We’ll start with everybody’s favorite behemoth of Protestantism…

This map is striking. I considered setting a higher threshold, but I used the 5% threshold for Lutheranism too when it had a similar pattern of regional dominance and concentration. What is most striking to me is how incredibly powerful state lines are: Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Texas, and West Virginia all show up strongly. Confederate-sympathizing southern Illinois shows up too.

It’s no secret what the source of this division is: the Civil War. Areas that seceded or were sympathetic to secession broke away and formed the Southern Baptist Conference. There have been some realignments since then, and Southern Baptists have filtered west, but it’s actually striking how little Southern Baptists have been able to extend their geographic territory since 1860, even juuuust over the border into Iowa or Kansas.

Pivoting a bit, we can look at the flip-side of Baptist religious life and the civil war, and see historically black Baptist religiosity:

And it turns out… it’s pretty low, and concentrated in the south and a few northern cities, with a smattering on the west coast. I’m able to identify just a little over 400,000 attendees of historically black baptist churches, so comparable to the historically black Methodist churches. For reference, the denomination-level statements of the 4 denominations indicate membership of 9–14 million people, though it turns out adding up individual churches only yields about 2.5–3 million members, suggesting that the denominational higher-ups are defining adherency very differently than local churches do.

Finally, we can cover aaaaalll the other baptists: regular, old regular, general, northern, American, etc.

These groups could be called the “distinctive religion” of West Virginia, Arkansas, and southern Indiana. Of the 1 million “other baptists,” about 750,000 are “American Baptist,” that is, the denomination of baptists that sided with the Union, not the Confederacy. About 100,000 of these attendees are in what might be called “traditionalist” or “primitivist” denominations, which espouse radical simplicity in worship and are even more fiercely opposed to social change than the Southern Baptist Conference. But take note: West Virginia’s “other baptists” prominence is due almost entirely to an elevated “American Baptist” presence due to West Virginia’s founding Unionism, while radical traditionalist baptists are not much more prominent in West Virginia than anywhere else.

Whew. Okay. We did Congregationalists, Pietists, Methodists, and Baptists. That covered a lot of ground. Let’s move on now… to the Second Great Awakening.

Second Great Awakening Denominations

There are three really big families of denominations that sprang from the Second Great Awakening, a sudden growth in American religiosity in the early 19th century: Adventism, Restorationism, and the Holiness movement. Within Adventism, an extreme variation morphed into the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who I’ve already discussed. Likewise, Mormonism arose during this period too. So since I’ve already discussed those, I won’t revisit them.

But let’s finish up the Adventist family first. Adventists were typified early on by a belief in a new spiritual “Advent,” which some read as a new spiritual dispensation requiring new things of believers, and some read as the imminent second-coming of Christ.

I had no strong prior on Adventist geography before seeing this map, and was surprised to learn that their geographic center is the Pacific Northwest. That’s curious for a movement that got its start in the Second Great Awakening in the east, but apparently Adventism grew tremendously in the west. Today, there are better than 600,000 attending Adventists in the US.

Next up, we can look at the Restorationists. Restorationists believed themselves to be “Restoring” the early Church, before it was corrupted by human innovations not from God. These movements tended to be fixated on communitarianism, non-Creedalism, and evangelism. It’s worth mentioning here that Mormonism can be seen as a fusion of Adventism and Restorationism: Mormons teach a second Advent of Christ in America already occurred (and in some sense that a third did too, to Joseph Smith), and they also teach that the Church of Latter Day Saints is the only authoritative heir of the Apostolic ministry, consciously modeling their church hierarchy on their view of 1st century Christianity. But, again, I’m not focused on Mormonism here, but on the Disciples of Christ, the Christian Churches, the Churches of Christ, the Christian Churches and Churches of Christ… and, um, yeah these denominations all have basically the same name with the words slightly re-ordered.

Restorationism is very Middle America. Its heartland stretches from west Texas, up through Missouri and Arkansas, into Tennessee, Illinois, Kentucky, and Ohio. And with nearly 2 million people filling the pews each week, Restorationism is one of the larger Protestant religious movements in America today. I’m not sure exactly what explains its geographic range; maybe the migrations of people from Tennessee and Kentucky westward. And of course, historically, Restorationism did get its start in Kentucky and Tennessee. I just keep jumping ship from one Protestant denomination to another.

Also, sidenote, true Restorationists would very much dislike me referring to them as have a denomination, because they explicitly reject denominationalism. Hence the very similar denominational names: they eschew coming up with actual names for themselves.

From Restorationism, we move on to the Holiness movement. Much of the Holiness movement was within denominations, especially Methodism, encouraging a re-awakening of personal piety and, well, Holiness. The Holiness movement was instrumental in temperance, abolitionism, and womens’ rights movements. My map of Holiness Movement churches below reflects only denominations founded in response to this movement, not those influenced by it like Methodism.

Fun biographical fact: I’m born to an ordained Methodist member, grew up attending a Restorationist megachurch less than 30 miles from where Restorationism was invented, was raised steeped in Holiness-movement living (remember, I don’t drink), and ended up…. Lutheran. I’m such a disappointment.

As you can see, the map of the Holiness movement is… odd. There’s a clear cluster in the central midwest through to western New York… and maybe a second cluster on the great plains, and a third out on the west coast. But all in all, it’s a hard group to pin down, regionally. Its biggest constituent denomination is the Church of the Nazarene, with about 500,000 of the 1.4 million total Holiness-movement churchgoers. The Wesleyan Church, Christian and Missionary Alliance, and Church of God (Anderson, Indiana) all add another 200,000 or so each, while the Salvation Army and Missionary Church each add about 70,000, with the remainder being various small denominations.

So that’s a wrap on the Second Great Awakening… but before we move on to the charismatic and pentecostal movements, I want to mention the phenomenon of nondenominationalism. Arising from the Second Great Awakening, in the modern period nondenominationalism has taken on a life of its own and grown rapidly. Nondenomination churches are tough to track, but the religion Census has made a valiant effort. Here’s a map of these churches, which have their intellectual antecedent, and often their historic origin, in Restorationist and Holiness churches:

Not too much of a trend really. A bit more on the west coast, a bit more around Indiana or the Carolinas or central Texas… but nondenominationalism is significant almost everywhere. The only regions with notably low rates of nondenominationalism are New England, the Dakotas, Utah, and Appalachian Kentucky.

Charismatic and Pentecostal Churches

Next up, we’ve got the Pentecostal and Charismatic churches. I’ll start with the most extreme end of Pentecostalism, Oneness Pentecostalism, which, since they’re non-Trinitarian, I considered putting in the “Other Abrahamic” group above… but for now, I’m still putting them here, under Pentecostalism, rather than as a non-Christian religion which, yeah, since they deny the Trinity, they probably should not be classified as Christian. Anyways, here they are:

Now, full disclosure, this map of ~1 million Oneness Pentecostal churches is probably incomplete. One of the big Oneness groups had no county-level data at all, and many Pentecostal churches are not denominationally affiliated. I tried to make adjustments for this by inflating the data I had available… but alas, incompleteness is almost guaranteed. But still, even at just 1 million attendees, radical Pentecostalism amounts to a waaaaay bigger population than I “mentally estimate.” Bigger than Anglicans, Anabaptists, or the Holiness movement? Really? Really.

Next, we can look at the rest of Pentecostalism and Charismatic churches. This is a diverse group that believes many different things; and many churches are not denominationally affiliated. But, broadly speaking, all of these churches place a heavy emphasis on special spiritual gifts and external signs of those gifts as being very important for a believers’ salvation and assurance. Now, as a Lutheran, I have a curious kinship here, as we also believe in the importance of an external spiritual gift, indeed its near-necessity for salvation, in our case baptism and, generally speaking, communion. But Pentecostals tend to have a lower view of baptism and communion, while establishing “baptism of the Holy Spirit” and speaking in tongues in the spiritual place Lutherans might reserve for the Sacraments.

Mainstream Pentecostal and Charismatic churches have major demographic hubs in the Atlantic or Deep South, Oklahoma/Arkansas, and around the west coast. And with over 3 million identifiable worshipers (and probably more given data constraints), this is one of the single largest families of Christians in America, representing large shares of the population in many regions, reflecting worshipers of many different ethnic and racial backgrounds.

The Geography of Religiosity

When we sum up all of the different groups I’ve identified, and make some adjustments for unaccounted groups or groups I couldn’t classify, we can get an estimate of about what share of a region’s local population attends any religious body at least once a week, or rather, as I’ll show in the map below, the rate of non-attendance.

The speckling of red counties are those where the number of people in the pews on Sunday morning plausibly exceeded half the population in 2010. As you can see, that’s virtually nowhere.

There are, of course, more and less religiously observant areas. Utah, the Great Plains, and the western South all show up as particularly observant, with better than 25% of their population showing up for religious meetings once a week. Meanwhile, the non-Mormon west, central Appalachia, the whole Atlantic seaboard, New England, and much of the central Rust Belt show up as rather less religious. On the whole, the religion census data suggests that only something like 20% of Americans are actually regular enough religious attendees for their own churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples to recognize them as such in official data.

That may be higher than you expected, or lower than you expected. Compare that to 2010 data showing 55–65% of Americans being “adherents” or “members” of some identifiable religious group. In other words, only about 1/3 of Americans with a religious identification can be bothered to show up.

I have no historic data on attendance, so I don’t know if this is high or low. I suspect it reflects a substantial amount of decline, but I would also suggest the “membership boom” for churches, whereby American religiosity rose sharply from 1900 to the 1960s and 1970s, largely reflected slackened membership standards: churches got more flexible on who they called a member, so probably the trend on attendance shows less boom, but also probably less bust.

We can also break out religiosity by a few key categories: Trinitarian Christians, Non-Trinitarian Christian-Descent, and Other.

As you can see, Trinitarian Christianity dominates most of middle America… but is weak in the west (outside of central and southern California), Appalachia, the Chesapeake, and New England. And yes, folks, Christianity has a low presence in central Appalachia. Get it through your thick heads already that Appalachia is not the same as the (rest of the?) South!

Next, we’ll turn to non-Trinitarian groups descended from Christianity, all summed up together. This is mostly Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Oneness/Radical Pentecostals.

Basically, Mormons dominate, and non-Trinitarianism generally is greatest in the west. And I should note, I am using a slightly different scale here which lets more low-percentage counties show up for non-Trinitarians; otherwise, only Mormonland would show up. Also, for my confessional Lutheran readers, yes I am being really charitable to very liberal denominations like ELCA, DOC, and others: if they were founded on Trinitarian doctrines and if they continue to not explicitly and formally reject the Trinity, I’m calling them Trinitarian, even if, well, that may not always be totally correct.

Next up, we’ve got the non-Christian religions.

Non-Christian-Descent religions are much rarer in the USA so I have to set a much lower scale: but you can see regional clusters in New England, Florida, California, and urban hubs around the country, and I would be remiss if I did not mention, for the first time in this post, Hawaii.

The Geography of Specific Beliefs

When I pitched this article to my Official Review Board (that is, my wife), she made a strident criticism that I had tarred the good name of faithful, orthodox Christians. “Lyman!” she exclaimed, “You cannot lump LCMS Christians in with ELCA. We’re totally different! They don’t believe [list of things Christians should believe].”

The Geography of Biblical Infallibility

Fair point. So let’s track a few beliefs. We’ll start with biblical inerrancy. What share of the population attends churches that confess the bible to be essentially infallible? I’m doing binaries here people so I don’t have time for your arguments about whether it’s infallible, inerrant, infallible-in-all-that-it-teaches, etc. We’re going with a hard-and-fast “Are you a weasel about whether the Bible is mostly a product of by-definition-inerrant Divine Inspiration, or are you pretty adamant that This Is God’s Word?”

In terms of the whole population, churches that teach some version of the infallibility of scripture are most prominent in the south and the plains, with lesser hubs in California and the upper Atlantic coast. There are very large gaps in the west, New England, and the central east, meanwhile.

We can also present this not as a share of population, but as a share of Trinitarian church attenders.

This map reflects all sorts of different trends. It can reflect a large Biblicist population… or a small Trinitarian population overall. It reflects, of course, the geography of the denominations I’ve identified as believing some version of biblical infallibility. It reflects the fact that attendance rates even within denominations vary widely across regions. But broadly speaking, we can say that churches confessing something like the infallibility of scripture (and I include, for reference, Roman Catholics in this group) most dominate Trinitarian church attendance in the deep south, , the southwest, the lower midwest and east Tennessee, and the upper Atlantic areas.

Doubtless my Protestant readers will take umbrage at the inclusion of those idolatrous rapscallions, the Papists. So here’s the share of infallibility-confessing-church-attendance among Protestants in each county.

Bible-believing Protestants, here’s a map of where you are the kingpins of Protestantism. In the red areas, you have hegemonic dominance of Sunday morning. Where the map is pale, rather less so. Your native turf is pretty clearly that arc from Lousiana into E. TN back around to Missouri, with a smattering in the lower Chesapeake and some random western counties.

Here’s a different way to view it:

Now, red marks areas with a relatively low share of infallibility-confessing church attendance. As you can see, the heartland of “Did God really say?” Christianity is New England and the upper midwest, with a fair amount out in the west as well.

Now, in fairness, this is “attendance at churches who broadly believe X.” What the individuals themselves believe is a whole different question, and polling shows that the very most conservative denominations still have large shares that don’t believe scripture, and vice versa. One would think, however, that church attendees are more likely to believe their church’s official teachings than survey-based self-identifiers.

The Geography of Christ’s Body and Blood

For this one, I’ll look at communion. What is it? Again, we’re dealing with institutional statements of belief, not what actual churchgoers say they believe. I’ll divide into three categories: communion is very-nearly-literally the gall bladder of Jesus Christ served up raw and bloody for Sunday munchies (Roman Catholics, Orthodox), communion really is really Jesus but c’mon guys that is not a chunk of flesh (Lutherans and Anglicans), and communion is a very nice thing we do sometimes but, people, Jesus said to remember him not to eat him (everybody else).

A few notes:

1. “Est.” what now Zwingli.
2. I know my Lutheran readers will be all bent out of shape about being lumped in with the Anglicans. Yes, I know we have so many differences and it’s totally different and they’re completely wrong about everything… but c’mon guys, we’re both espousing a hard-to-articulate middle position on the issue, is it so hard to be charitable to the Brit proclivity to over-explain?

To start with, here are the Jesus cannibals:

At 18 million church attendees, or almost 6% of America’s population, about 1 in every 17 Americans believes that they literally, by a miraculous transformation, eat a version of Jesus physical body which simply looks and tastes like bread. The vast majority, of course, are Roman Catholics, so this map basically just looks like a map of Catholicism.

Next, we’ll turn to another silly thing to believe, namely that communion is a merely symbolic act we perform in memory of Christ, and yeah he totally was not serious about that whole “This is my body” thing.

The south and lower midwest show up as a major stronghold for Christians who think Jesus was speaking casually without regard to future doctrinal implications on the night he was to be arrested and hauled off for crucifixion. At over 30 million worshipers, about 1 in every 10 Americans goes to church and comes away thinking that they encountered Jesus nowhere but in their heart, and these folks are concentrated in the south.

Sad!

Finally, we get to those of us who think Jesus was serious about the eating and the remembering both, that He definitely wanted us to know that we can have an external and objective encounter with Him after his death, and also that maybe coming up with a macabre theory of bread-transmutation is not what any of the biblical authors intended.

Sanity is always rare, so our view is the least common, meaning I have to crank up the scale a bit. Attendance at churches confessing Sacramental Union or Consubstantiation amounts to just 3 million people, or one in every hundred Americans. But that’s okay, because the Lutheran church also teaches that the fewer people who come, the more communion you get to eat, which makes you extra-saved. It’s why we don’t evangelize.

(It’s a pitiable fact about religious education today I probably need to indicate that the above two sentences are jokes. If you can’t mock your own denomination, then you’re doing religion wrong)

The Geography of Holiness (or Teetotaling, at least)

We can also look at religious groups that oppose alcohol consumption. Here, I will include non-Christian groups.

So… southern Baptists and Mormons show up big time, with Adventists, Muslims, Holiness churches, some Methodists, and a few other groups fleshing out the numbers in various regions. This is also basically a map of “grapejuice communion.”

And here’s a map of heavy drinking:

Turns out religious opposition to drinking reduces drinking. Surprise.

Conclusion

This post is already long enough (too long!) so I’ll cut it off here. I hope you learned something about American religious geography!

Check out my Podcast about the history of American migration.

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I’m a native of Wilmore, Kentucky, a graduate of Transylvania University, and also the George Washington University’s Elliott School. My real job is as an economist at USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service, where I analyze and forecast cotton market conditions. I’m married to a kickass Kentucky woman named Ruth.

DISCLAIMER: My posts are not endorsed by and do not in any way represent the opinions of the United States government or any branch, department, agency, or division of it. My writing represents exclusively my own opinions. I did not receive any financial support or remuneration from any party for this research.