Religion in the US: Map

Very interesting and useful map, props. Obviously haven't studied it all, but two questions immediately pop up based on what I have looked at: where (College station? Huntsville?) and why is there this little cluster of Lutherans in the middle of Texas?

 

There are a couple of interesting migration pattern inferences from these charts.

Catholic distributions seem to be heavily influenced by south and central American immigration. There is one extremely heavy concentration of Catholics in Ohio that I've been to (my best friend's parents' home town) that actually shows up on the national map! Every single person in that town was Catholic.

I was surprised at how relatively non-religious most of Appalachia is.

 

http://www.valpo.edu/geomet/pics/geo200/religion/church_bodies.gif

What's up with that grey county in West Texas that is "None". At least I think that's a 9 in there.

 

Right. But Germans settled a lot of places in this country, and if you look at the map, this one little area is an anomaly. Outside of one county in Ohio, there are no 25-50% Lutheran counties except in the places you'd expect (MN, WI, the Dakotas, etc.) So not only must there have been a tremendous concentration of German immigrants to a very small area of Texas, but also that since then the in/out migration hasn't appreciably changed the character of the counties. It's odd.

 

I did some looking into this, and found that Lee County, the western one of the two highly-Lutheran counties, was settled by Wendish Lutherans. Wends are a Slavic ethnic group from eastern Germany. It's a lightly populated rural area and probably hasn't seen big migration patterns.

http://www.texancultures.utsa.edu/publications/texansoneandall/wendish.htm

 

http://county-map.digital-topo-maps.com/texas.shtml
Looks like Washington & Lee counties.
http://www.alpha1.net/~awhart/wgenweb/washiton.htm
lots of German immigrants, still has 19 Lutheran churches
http://www.epodunk.com/cgi-bin/genealogyInfo.php?locIndex=22719
Lee county ancestry: German - 33%

 

Thank you both very much for your legwork. Noah Elliot, that link you provided is truly fascinating.

 

I'm not sure if this is relevant to your question, but College Station is the home of Texas A&M University and Huntsville is the home of Sam Houston State University. I've noticed that universities have a distorting effect next to neighboring counties, I suspect in some cases because they have international students (my county in the middle of banjo-strumming north central florida actually registers some muslims) and in others because they attract people to a center in rural areas. Texas A&M, while it is the 2nd largest and most prominent public university in the state, has a reputation for friendliness to students who are conservative and religious. I'm not familiar with a particularly Lutheran bent there, so I'm not exactly sure how my comments are relevant. However, I just wanted to say that you might bear in mind the presence of large universities in places where the population isn't what you'd expect.

 

It's the least populated county in the United States; the only incorporated town is the county seat (because there has to be at least one).

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/48/48301.html

There was a story in National Geographic on it a few years back.

 

Texas A&M students are probably, for the most part, Baptist or Methodist (or some other denomination with an evangelical bent). Definitely not Lutheran.

 

Baptists aren't really evangelical. It's fine with them if you go to Hell.

 

Ya, you know, it's true what you say. That makes Brazos county's Lutheran bent even stranger. . .

 

I want to visit the Aleutian Islands. I can't imagine a place in the US where up to 20% of the inhabitants are Orthodox. I've known that was the case up there, it'd just be nice to go somewhere where you don't have to constantly explain your religion.

 

Just say you are like Catholics, only with married priests who wear beards.

It is funny how Catholic Long Island is. As a kid, I thought there were three kinds of people in the world, Italian Catholics, Irish Catholics and Jews. At 9 I went to a Lutheran wedding and it blew my mind -- how could those people exist?

 

There's a bit more to it than that.

 

Buy yet they put up three crosses on every bloody hill you drive past.

 

Well depends, are you Russian Orthodox?

Because that's what almost all of them in Alaska are within the Orthodox population. Alaska used to be extended terriority of Russia, until the U.S. bought the already Russian-inhabited land from them for like a $1.99 (plus a 30% discount) in the 19th century.

If you're Greek, Egyptian, Armenian, or one of the Syro Orthodox, you still might have a tough time being "understood" because of the difference in the Russian liturgy and tradition. I'm not even sure if one is allowed to partake in the sacraments from the various Orthodox Churches? And if you meant to suggest you're Eastern (Byzantine/Orthodox) Catholic... good luck trying to even enter a Russian Orthodox church.

 

Argh. I've been trying for weeks to open this page, but I time out every time. Is there a way someone can link or attach a .gif of the map? Thanks!

 

If you belong to one of the Eastern Orthodox churches (Russian, Bulgarian, Antiochian, Romanian, Serbian, Albanian, Japanese, American, etc.) then it's the same thing and you can partake of the sacraments in each other's churches. Most of the Orthodox parishes in the Aleutian Islands are part of the OCA (Orthodox Church in America.) They do their services in English, Slavonic (Russia) or Aleutian, or a mixture of those.

They are seperate from the Oriental Orthodox family of churches (Armenian, Ethiopian, Syrian, Indian, Coptic).

Eventhough the Eastern & Oriental Orthodox are seperate, they're still fairly closely related (though there's no sharing of sacraments.)

 

Nicodemus,

Thanks.

On another note, check out the lone county in southern Mississippi where Catholics are the largest group.

http://www.valpo.edu/geomet/pics/geo200/religion/church_bodies.gif

Mississippian Catholic. I feel like I'm uttering Alaskan Hispanic.

 

A lot of people don't remember (or don't know) that the Gulf Coast was once French and Spanish territory.

There are some beautiful old Catholic cathedrals in places like Mobile and other spots you wouldn't think of.

 

My french forebears from Marseilles first settled in Mobile, before moving over to New Orleans. That was well before the revolution.

 

I used to date a woman who was a Mobile Catholic.

 

That beats a Sedentary Catholic any day.