Map of dominant US religious affiliations

[saizai]

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2008/01/27/237-regionalism-and-religiosity/

[biomorph]

Hia, I thought I'd do a little comparing with the last godtube map, just to see who were the most keen, looks like the baptist's (as per usual maybe?) are at the moment the keenest members...

Just off the top of my head and bored to boot...............:)

[Tsukasa Buddha]

Cool.

I find it so ironic where the Catholics are compared to the feelings about them at the beginning of the country in New England.

And lol at one of the colors being just "Christian" :) .

[Darth Rotor]

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2008/01/27/237-regionalism-and-religiosity/
That map may give you a false sense of information. It boils down to counties. Within each of those counties will be a variety of sects. Within ten miles of my home, you can find

Lutheran
Presbyterean
Catholic
Baptist
Methodist
and a whole lot of other churches.

But my county is labeled "blue." All told, if you add up all the churches, the majority are not catholic churches.

Your map is slightly misleading, don't you think?

Let me put it another way.

How is the biggest sect in a given county a valid marker if there are dozens of sects?

Take a county where the the biggest group is is Baptist, with 23 percent, the next biggest Lutheran with 13%, the next catholic, with 11 %, and so on.

The map is marked red, yet the majority are NOT Baptist.

I am trying to determine what the "So what" is of this map. While an interesting attempt at depicting a complex demographic mixture, it seems on the face of it to misrepresent what it intends to represent.

DR

[Myshkin]

That map may give you a false sense of information...
...Your map is slightly misleading, don't you think?

It could certainly be misinterpreted or used to spin the facts, but in itself, it is exactly what it says it is. If one understands what is being presented, there is no misinformation. The text clearly states what metric the colors and symbols represent. A county gets the color of the denomination having a plurality, and also a + if it has a majority.

That said, I'm not sure that what it represents provides any meaningful information about religious affiliation patterns. In addition to the "winner-take-all" color scheme, which treats all pluralities the same, whether they are by 1% or 90%, a lot of it depends on how you group or split the sub-sets of major denominations. The Protestant denominations are more similar to each other than they are to Catholicism, yet are treated as separate groups. A group named simply "Protestant" would probably result in a very different map. But no matter how you sliced it, Utah and southern Idaho would probably remain LDS.

[A Christian Sceptic]

I think it would be interesting to have a map showing which counties have no churches of a certain denomination / sect / what have you.

[sthomson]

All told, if you add up all the churches, the majority are not catholic churches.

Your map is slightly misleading, don't you think?

The author himself admits this:
Most of the other counties have Catholics as the most numerous congregation, leading to a somewhat misleading map. Catholicism very often is the biggest denomination by default, owing to the fact that their institutional unity boosts ‘market share’ but at the same time masks differences between different wings of the Roman church that are as great as between denominations of Protestantism that have separated over theological differences.


I am trying to determine what the "So what" is of this map. While an interesting attempt at depicting a complex demographic mixture, it seems on the face of it to misrepresent what it intends to represent.

Well now, the "So What?" question is difficult without the original methodology (note that the author of the blog post did not create the map. See the in-map citation. It is created and updated by the ASARB (http://www.asarb.org/index.html).) For example, does the "None" category mean that those counties had more people not affiliated with a church than affiliated with a church? That would mean something rather significant, indeed.

[saizai]

DR - I agree with your criticism. Personally I think it'd work better as a dot-map (eg 1 dot per 1000 adherents) or similar. But I didn't make the map, and evidently the authors haven't read Tufte.

It's still interesting anyway, even if the only point of information is plurality.

[SezMe]

Look at the comment just east of Florida. The map is self-reported data. Makes it MIGHTY suspicious.

[Fnord]

No "Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster"? It isn't even listed under "Other"!

:(

[NobbyNobbs]

I'm a bit confused. I always thought "Christian" encompassed all of the others listed there?

[shadron]

I imagine Christian is referring to the Church of Christ. From their wikipedia entry:

Churches of Christ consider themselves "Christians only" and do not identify as Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant. They believe that biblically and historically the church was founded by Jesus Christ and his teachings and desire for the church are found in the Scriptures of the New Testament. Therefore, they claim that the church and its doctrines and practices transcend these other entities, traditions, movements, structures, councils, etc. that developed later within Christendom. Members do not typically consider themselves to be members of a denomination, but prefer to simply be known as "Christians" (in contrast to, for example, a Catholic Christian, a Presbyterian Christian, a Baptist Christian, etc.), with no other religious title needed or preferred. Thus, they believe a collective group of Christians should be referred to as a Church of Christ.

[Darth Rotor]

DR - I agree with your criticism. Personally I think it'd work better as a dot-map (eg 1 dot per 1000 adherents) or similar. But I didn't make the map, and evidently the authors haven't read Tufte.

It's still interesting anyway, even if the only point of information is plurality.
Yes, that would have worked better, as the higher dot count would still tend to shade toward the plurality when taking the eagle's eye view. And yes, not without interest.

DR

[joobz]

I am trying to determine what the "So what" is of this map.
I think it's an opportunity to make democrats feel good. I mean, look at all those blue states!!!!!