U.S. Religious Groups & Religious Maps

What is the difference between a cult and a religion? 100 years!

In a recent Gallup poll, 63% of Americans said they believed that religion could solve the vast majority of today's social problems, a percentage which has remained stable for 30 years. Over 70% of Americans are members of a church or synagogue, and 40% attend regularly, compared with only 12% in Britain.

According to Gallup polls, only 10% of the USA population (30 million, which is larger than the total number of Roman Catholics and Baptists combined) say they hold a secular, scientific evolutionist view of the world, while 44% believe in strict biblical creationism. Three times as many people believe in the Virgin birth than in evolution.

Read a relevant article. About 2,000 different religious denominations and cults are found in the United States! The United States supports more than 200 Christian TV channels and 1,500 Christian radio stations. The USA is three times more religious today than at the start of the republic, measured by church attendance -- in other rich countries, including Canada, church attendance and religious beliefs are declining in importance. Unique to the USA, may public policy issues are framed in religious terms: sex, abortion, alcoholism, stem-cell research, homosexuality, and divorce.

Check-out some amazing church signs from across the country. What do they say about the USA?

Data for the maps below come from Churches and Church Membership in the United States, 1990. Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut. Angela Laufenberg, a geography major at UWEC, used these electronic data to make the maps, which were presented at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Chicago, IL. Here are the general church patterns:

number of churches per county -- this map is also included in your course booklet, which you bought in the bookstore
average number of churches per denomination by county
all denominations per 1,000 population by county
percent of adherents per population by county

The U.S. racial and ethnic diversity by county relates to the distribution of religious denominations.
Examine county-level maps for various religious groups.

Evolution of Religious Groups: (Source: D. B. Barrett, World Christian Encyclopedia. 1982)

Christianity	split into the (western) Roman Catholic and the (eastern) Orthodox Churches.
Roman Catholicism	gave rise to Lutheranism, Anglicanism, and Calvinism.
Anglicanism	gave rise to Methodism and Congregationalism.
Calvinism	gave rise to Baptist and Presbyterianism.
Presbyterianism	gave rise to the Dutch Reform Church.

Based on a 2006 opinion poll, the people in the U.S. hold different views of God or its absence:
1) authoritarian God: 31 percent
2) benevolent God: 23 percent, rising to 29 percent in the Midwest
3) critical God: 16 percent, but 21 percent in the relativist East Coast
4) distant God: 24 percent
5) atheists: 6 percent.

Optional:
Read a book review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion.
Read about the issues raised by religious freedom and associated practices in multi-religious and civil societies.

Created by Ingolf Vogeler on 1 February 1996; last revised on 25 February 2008.