The Baptist Map

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

The Lutheran was also interesting. Seems like there is a pocket of them in Texas, probably near San Marcos, as there are quite a few ethnic German-Americans there.

 

Demographics are fun to play with. So should we be asking ourselves how we reach the people that don't go to church anywhere?

 

Here are all the pics.

Valpo : American Ethnic Geography : Map Gallery of Religion in the United States

The data comes from the Glenmary Research Center which is a Catholic organization.

This map shows the largest group in each county.

 

One explanation I've heard for the CSA and the Bible Belt being in the same spot is that when the population of the South started to lose the war it turned very religious.

 

Hay, don't disclose the location of our "UFO" base, they can't haul everyone to heaven.

 

It was very religious before the invasion, although tainted with hypocrisy similar to today's. The North, also, was very religious. American church history cannot be understood apart from revivalism, which affected our nation like no other.

It wasn't that the South became religious, but rather that the North went into apostasy. Something in the water up there made them receptive to new philosophical outlooks which differed from the historic Western tradition and as they adopted these new ideas, they had to dethrone the Bible in order to maintain their devotion to Christ and to the ideas simultaneously.

Perhaps no more vivid example could be offered that Charles Finney's statement that even if God and the Bible were to authorize slavery, it couldn't be right. He saw "right" as something logically prior to the will of God, and something he, Finney, could perceive immediately. Such an approach slowly eroded confidence in the Bible, since we could now tell it what it had to say.

For some reason, the South simply was not receptive to the tidal wave of new philosophy that swept through the North. This meant, of course, that they needed their Christian brothers up north to come kill them.

Among rural people, I suspect that the Southern reluctance to accept new ideas is still a regional characteristic. One fruit of that is the persistent evangelicalism of ungodly people.