An intriguing new Gallup survey reveals that the religious identification for most states tends to match the immigration patterns of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The distribution of Catholics across the states, for example, is heavily skewed toward the New England and Mid-Atlantic states, the regions of the country where the largest waves of Catholic immigrants arrived from Europe.
The state with highest percentage of Catholics is Rhode Island (fifty-three percent), followed by Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York. States with high percentages of Hispanics—California, New Mexico—also have above average proportions of their residents who are Catholic as does Louisiana, home to immigrating French Canadians (Cajuns) several centuries ago.
The states with the highest proportion of non-Catholic Christians are, not surprisingly, those in the historically Protestant Bible Belt states of the South: Mississippi and Alabama top this list with eighty-one and eighty percent of their citizens identifying as Protestants.
Which group would you guess comprises a larger proportion of the population, Jews or Mormons? I suspect if you live east of the Mississippi River you’d say Jews while West of the Rockies you’d think it was Mormons (folks in between probably go either way—I would have guessed Mormons).
Turns out that both groups comprise about two percent of American adults, though they are concentrated in different regions of the country. New York has the highest percentage of Jewish residents (seven percent) followed closely by New Jersey (six percent) and the District of Columbia (five percent).
Similarly, Mormons tend to concentrate around Utah—where six out of ten residents are LDS. Idaho and Wyoming have nineteen percent and ten percent Mormon populations, respectively, while Arizona and Nevada have between five and six percent.
People with no religious affiliation tend to group at the far edges of the country: Oregon tops the list, with twenty-five percent of its residents claiming no particular religious identity, followed closely by Vermont at twenty-four percent, and Alaska, Maine, Hawaii, New Hampshire, and Washington with around twenty percent.
Three of the largest religious groups in America—Catholics, Mormons, and evangelical Protestants—have historically been known for their missionary zeal. So why do the current patterns look much the same as a century ago? Have these groups decided to stick to their own turfs or are they simply unable to gain new converts in areas where people still hold onto the religious views of their immigrant ancestors? Should we expect to see these same patterns persist throughout this century or will other factors reshape the religious landscape?
