The geography of faith
 

Someone just sent me this:

http://www.valpo.edu/geomet/pics/geo.../adherents.gif

http://www.valpo.edu/geomet/pics/geo.../adherents.gif

What struck me immediate wasn't where the high concentrations of faith are but where they aren't. Obviously, Salt Lake City and Orange County, CA are going to be large populations of the faithful, along with largely rural areas.

No, the surprising thing for me was places like West Virginia, Maine, Central Michigan (LP) and the band that runs through East Central Virginia through Eastern North Carolina. A lot of places can be explained by the predominant industry (universities in the case of Central Florida, gambling in Clark Co., NV) or the predominance of a particular brand of religion (Catholicism in Chicago), but why is Northern California so devoid of the faithful?

I put this in Politics because of the obvious ramifications this has with elections. If someone has the last general election results by county in this kind of format easily available to them, I think it would make an interesting comparision.

Looks like Oregon is a safe zone. That's interesting.

Just to be clear, this is based on 7 year old data, and atheism is seriously on the rise. It's possible that a more recent version of this could be more tan and less red.

will, that's certainly possible, but I'm sure that this is census data and should be pretty accurate as such. Any new numbers found in 3 years would, of course, be a much better replacement than anything coming from more limited survey.

Interestingly enough, the really crazy Mormons in Northwestern AZ (the Warren Jeffs group) doesn't seem to have a big impact on the numbers. Strange.

On a related note, Europe's belief in god...

interesting graphic.
it's hard to interpret this sort of thing. first for me at 11:43 am on friday the 13th of july---for some reason, i couldn't move back from the graphic link to the source material, so i dont know what the data is--i assume it's based on the last census.

if so, then ticking off a box that identifies you with a particular religion doesn't really say terribly much about you: nothing about what that identification means, nothing about degree of participation, nothing about the political orientation of the denomination, etc.

that the states is full of people who process via religion is not news---tocqueville worried about the implications of this for democracy in america after 1830, when it plausibly existed. that said, the graphic is very cool to stare at.

aside: i still dont think atheism is on the rise--i think the term atheism is more prominent because it was a rhetorical device that the protestant right used to "explain" the collapse of the political coalition it was part of. from my wayward youth involvement with a pentacostalist group, i dont remember much latitude in far right protestant discourse for explaining defeat except attributing it to the rise of the Forces of Evil, Satan and his Minions, which obviously include those nasty demonic forces called atheists.

I agree that atheism is not particularly on the rise. Also, it appears that the data in The_Jazz's map is taken from reports by religious bodies, which is both bad and good. Good because the people who are most into religion are much more likely to attend services on a regular basis, but bad because there are plenty of people who view the world through a religious perspective but do not regularly attend religious services.

Agreed. I don't practice, but I would check off the box.

This came from the same website...

Proof positive that the world very often just doesn't operate in easily explainable data models...

http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b2...ction_2004.gif

The blue areas have a lot more people per capita overall.

Not easily explainable, but a few things I'd point to are 1) again, that the data in the first chart is from the religious institutions themselves, so it says nothing of how many people have a religious mindset but don't practice enough to be official members, and 2) religion isn't the only source of social conservatism. McHenry county has a reputation in the Chicagoland area for being particularly conservative (and even religious), but it is marked in the 35.1-50% range. Part of that probably comes from the suburban soccer mom, gated community mindset that exists in some places out there, rather than from religious convictions. A lot of suburban whites are tacitly racist as well. Point is, the social conservative mindset is not necessarily tied to religion and I would even posit that socially conservative religions are the result of a preexisting mindset and not the other way around.

Obviously Smeth is right that religoun is not the only source of conservatism, and his McHenry County referrence is wellplaced. There are obviously many other factors as well.

MixedMedia, I wasn't clear in what I was looking for. I was hoping to find something that reflected margin of victory instead of the yes/no. Then again, I don't think I've ever seen that reflected on the chart.

When I compare these two, however, I see some interesting pockets, such as Southern Texas. I would think that there's some other factor driving those folks into voting for Kerry such as a vote AGAINST Bush, but it's hard to tell. Some of the most religious parts of Colorado, which is home to some of the biggest far-right Christians in the world, went for Kerry.

Sometimes I love data points like these.