Bloodless Coup

Where to Find the Religious in America

There's an interesting map in the new issue of The Atlantic. It shows proportion of religious adherents in the United States by county. While there are certainly centers of believers outside the area (Utah, Massachusetts and Rhode Island for example), the highest concentartion of religious Americans seems to be in a somewhat trapezoidal area that runs from New Mexico and Alabama in the South to Wisconsin and the Dakotas in the North. As most would expect, you find the fewest religious adherents in the Pacific Northwest. But what I found most interesting about the map is that there is a large swath of the country that runs from Michigan, through Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia and south down the Atlantic coast, where the concentration of religious believers is markedly lower than it is to the West in the "heartland". I don't know what explains this variation, but given that these areas (including much of Appalachia and the Tidewater) are not usually considered to be rampantly secular, it is a striking graphic.