Numbers don't lie
These maps show the most common religions, Christian and non-Christian, in your state
Christianity is the biggest religion in every U.S. state — but you already knew that. The Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies digs a little deeper, reporting which Christian denomination is the largest, and how many adherents each religion has, in each U.S. county.
The most recent U.S. Religion Census was actually released two years ago, based on 2010 data — there has been a religion census conducted every decade since 1980 in the same year as the U.S. census — but the 2010 ASARB maps recently resurfaced in the map-crazy dataphilic media. Here is the big look at which Christian sect is the biggest in your area:
Catholicism (purple) dominates much of the map, except for the South, where the Southern Baptists (red) hold sway. Mormonism (gray) is big in the Mountain West, and Lutherans (orange) and Methodists (green) have sizable pockets in the Midwest and Northeast. Probably more interesting is the ASARB's depiction of which non-Christian religion is the biggest in each state:
According to the map, Buddhism (yellow) is (relatively) big out West, Islam (light blue) is bigger than you might think in the Midwest and South, Judaism (pink) has its stronghold in the Northeast and pockets of the Midwest, Hinduism (dark orange) is surprisingly prevalent in Arizona and Delaware, and South Carolina has a vibrant Baha'i community (green). "Let's acknowledge at the outset that it doesn't take very much to be the second-largest religion in South Carolina," Baha'i historian Louis E. Venters tells NPR.
Hillary Kaell, a specialist in North American Christianity at Montreal's Concordia University, hits the same cautionary note: "These numbers, although they look impressive when laid out in the map, represent a very tiny fraction of the population in any of the states listed." Still, interesting.