Found this map at
Perell.com. Whenever I see cultural maps of the U.S. like this one, I look for the Bad Stripe, a coherent area that pops out as below-average in maps of human development indices. It stretches roughly from far western PA through West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee across Arkansas and into Oklahoma (
see more here.) My expectation would be higher religious belief across the Bad Stripe; or, at least, some pattern that makes the Bad Stripe stick out from surrounding areas. Not present at all; and typically, lower human development = more religious. Bad Stripe or not, there are some big surprises on this map, and it doesn't really align with both what most Americans would expect, as well as my own experience traveling and living in the country. West Virginia is much
less religious than Western Pennsylvania? Really? Central California has a religious stripe across the middle? I've lived near both these places and find this hard to believe. The Frontier Strip is evident but the Rockies, especially to the north, are mostly less religious than other rural areas - also very suspicious is the similar level of religiousness between rural and coastal areas of Pacific states. If California is going to have religious and unreligious zones, they're more likely to run north and south parallel to the (liberal, likely less religious) coast.
One problem across all such surveys is that how one defines "religious" (or in this case "religious adherents") matters a great deal. Was it something like asking "How important is religion to you?" Or "Do you belong to a church?" Looking at this map, I strongly suspect it was the second, and that many people in some area (eg West Virginia) that do not belong or regularly attend services would say that religion is quite important to them. A place that happens to have a single large church would look very religious, whereas a place where people were very religious but did not have many churches would look very un-religious.
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