Religious Geography

My "paying" work involves a lot of maps, generally focused on various aspects of health care in the United States. The same basic technology, which uses zipcode or other geographic data correlated to particular variables, has been used by the Glenmary Research Center to create national maps of religious faiths and denominations showing the concentration of adherents. Some of the maps are obvious, but others not - and if you're like me, it's fascinating to see the anomalies and surprises as well as the predictable results (what are all those Episcopalians doing in Alaska?) One especially interesting illustration maps the various church bodies as a whole. (Thanks to Numenius of Feathers of Hope for the link.)

Religious geography

Comments

[dale]

Wot, no Buddhists? And here's all these magazine articles implying we're overrunning the place! :-)

[Peter]

I'd be very skeptical of their data. I don't have any specific knowledge of survey problems, but the results make me suspicious. In the all-adherents map, for example, southern Ohio is shown as a low-rate region, something that flies in the face of its status as the state's Bible belt, where the GOP rolled up big vote totals with the anti-gay-rights amendment message. Some of New York's most sparsely populated Adirondack counties are shown as heavily Catholic, which doesn't seem right. And why is a county in the northern tier of Pennsylvania in the top group of Unitarians? Oh, well, it's still interesting.