The second-largest religion in each state | Hacker News Reader

The second-largest religion in each state

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73 pointschwolfe82 comments

I'd be curious to see how atheism fits in, if for this purpose it was counted as a religion.

Not what you after, but the best countries to be atheist in: http://www.salon.com/2012/08/29/eight_of_the_best_countries_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_in_the_Czech_Republ...

[corrected per namenotrequired's comment]

Small correction, it's "eight of the best countries to be atheist in", not "the most atheist countries".

"Slowly but surely, religion’s historical monopoly on the human mind is breaking apart."

I'm currently reading a book[1] by theologian/philosopher David Bentley Hart that shames to ground sentences like this. Also the idea that modernity is somehow superior to previous ages in regard to tolerance and reason. Nothing further from the truth.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Atheist-Delusions-Christian-Revolution...

"Hart closes the book in the present, delineating the ominous consequences of the decline of Christendom in a culture that is built upon its moral and spiritual values."

It seems that he doesn't claim in this book that religions monopoly isn't diminishing but rather reaffirms this fact at the same time expressing his opinion that it's bad.

You're correct. I chose to wrong quote to point out that in fact reason is not gaining any ground as religious authority fades away.

Instead of merely citing the author as an authority and stating your interpretation of his thesis, please offer some details from the source to back up your claim. Especially when asserting something that goes against prevailing wisdom, such as your statement that previous ages displayed equal or superior tolerance and reason. Dropping a link to a book doesn't make your points any more credible unless the book is free to read.

Some people buys books, you know. Unless you think that interwebz is for smart people that don't need to read books, or form comments are enough to build the 'prevailing wisdom'.

I'm curious, too, since it seems to be completely unmentioned. Did they take atheists and agnostics into account at all? I can't tell.

It doesn't answer the question, but Wikipedia has some interesting information on "irreligion" in the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_in_the_United_States

I'm going to guess they didn't. Most nationwide surveys generally indicate that "no religion" outnumbers all the other minority religions combined, so if they had the maps would presumably have been a lot more boring.

"I'd be curious to see how atheism fits in"

In the UK, we have a census every 10 years that tries to collect detailed information about the population. The last census was in 2011 and contained an optional question: what is your religion? The number who said they had no religion was 14.1 million which equals 25% of the population of England and Wales. This is a rise from the 2001 census where 15% of the population (of England and Wales) said they had no religion.

There was a decline in the number of people who called themselves Christian and a rise in all other minority religions.

Here's a very informative short video (4 mins) from the Office of National Statistics in the UK examining religion in England and Wales from the 2011 census.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXdZJoXuxC8

I wonder if people who identify as following no religion are more likely to answer the UK census question than people who follow a religion.

Perhaps. The video states that 7% (of the population of England and Wales) did not answer the question about religion. Also, these stats don't tell us anything about the practice of belief i.e. how religious people are. For example, are they nominally religious or actively practicing?

In New Zealand the 2013 census had 40% declared No Religion. Just under 50% are Christian, a full 12% were undeclared.

But, there's a difference between not having a religion and atheism. Atheism is the belief that there is no God.

Just because one does not have a religion does not make them atheist.

I have no religion and yet I am not an atheist.

Atheism is the lack of a belief in a god. You can categorise it into a subset of people who believe there is no god (positive atheism) and people who simply have no belief (negative atheism) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism#Implicit_vs._explicit

Semantics perhaps but isn't a 'belief that there is no god'? I tend to think of agnosticism as a 'lack of belief in a god'

A unicorn agnostic would say "I have no evidence for the existence of unicorns, so there may or may not be unicorns" but a unicorn atheist would say "I have no evidence for the existence of unicorns, so I don't believe unicorns exist".

It is a matter of semantics.

Agnosticism is a subset of atheism.

What if you can believe in god and have no religion?

Broadly speaking you would be a non religious theist.

If you believe a God exists and reject that it can be known through religion, that would make you a deist

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism

So, this dataset isn't broken down by state (just region), but it looks at what religion Americans say they have (including "None"), how that has changed over time since 1972, and how that differs by region: https://www.statwing.com/open/datasets/09f43e516bb656df54c54...

Pulled from the General Social Survey, which is an absolute goldmine of interesting stuff like this.

The Pew Center has some interesting research about "religious unaffiliation."[1] Unaffiliated is the second largest religious identification by a large margin at 16%, Judaism is the third largest group at 1.8%.[2]

The Global Religious Landscape Report has some interesting figures for the world population. Religiously unaffiliated was the third largest reported/identified group in the survey at 16.3% just barely nudging out Hinduism at 15%.[3]

[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/topics/religiously-unaffiliated/ Growth in US Specifically http://www.pewforum.org/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise/ and http://www.pewforum.org/2013/07/02/growth-of-the-nonreligiou...

[2] Page 50 http://www.pewforum.org/files/2014/01/global-religion-full.p...

[3] http://www.pewforum.org/2012/12/18/global-religious-landscap...

I'd be curious too but there is a big gap between no religious beliefs and Atheist. Many people just don't care about religion at all, some have mild beliefs, and some are devout, it's a broad spectrum. To some, their religious identification is more a statement of their lifestyle then their actual belief. For example my dad labels himself a Christian, despite admittedly having no actual belief because he adheres to Christian morality and it gives him a group to belong to. I've also known people identify as Buddhist because it fits closest to their lifestyle.

Unfortunately the label Atheist, has some pretty negative connotations to some people in the US.

The questions I'd really like to see: "Do your religious beliefs have an impact on your decision making" "Do you have full confidence in the core tenets of your religion" "How important is it to you to observe Religious rules?"

PS. Interesting stat, 40% of Americans claim to attend church regularly. But only 20% of Americans actually attend regularly. People often respond to polls with a more ideal version of reality. http://www.religioustolerance.org/rel_rate.htm

"Unfortunately the label Atheist, has some pretty negative connotations to some people in the US."

I live in a secularized country, where identifying as an Atheist is fairly common. I am curious regarding the "negative connotations" you mentioned. Which are they, and should I avoid revealing that I identify as Atheist when I travel to the US?

Maybe just avoid making a big deal out of it. In my travels over there, it didn't seem to come up and almost everyone was really friendly.

(Also live in a country where having no religion is the norm and there are probably more negative connotations for identifying as religious.)

It's not an encompassing stereotype but US does have some evangelists and devout Christians that believe that the US is a "Christian Nation". To them Atheists are the ones that took prayer out of school and that want to take the 10 commandments monuments off court steps. So some people view Atheists as troublemakers. It's mostly a political issue.

Realize I'm talking about a small minority, but they're also vocal. I doubt you will encounter them in tourist areas. In tourist areas people are more interested in your money then your religion, it just won't come up.

But in casual conversation with strangers, I personally identify as "Not Religious" instead of "Atheist". For some reason the term Atheist carries extra baggage in US.

"The US" is awfully big. Nobody cares if you're an atheist in New York or San Francisco, but it would definitely limit your social life in Nashville.

"If you don't believe in God then what stops you from murdering people?" is a question that has been asked of atheists I know.

There are students who, having been excluded from school prayers at the behest of their atheist parents, are ostracized by the town.

There has never been an (openly) non-religious President. (And a single digit number of non-Protestant Presidents.)

A political candidate's piety, or lack thereof, is fair game for a political smear campaign.

Of course, reactions vary greatly depending on where you are. Coastal urban areas are generally much more atheist-friendly; an open atheist will, at worst, simply be looked down on by the pious. The inland "Bible belt", not so much. Atheism = devil worship, and exorcisms are a thing that are still performed.

> (And a single digit number of non-Protestant Presidents.)

If I'm not mistaken, that number is 1 (JFK).

Thomas Jefferson was an unchurched Deist.

The Carolinas are more part of the bible belt than much of the Midwest.

(I've spent lots of time in Midwest areas that are well described as 'very Christian' and it simply isn't something that comes up. People certainly aren't talking about any exorcisms they have going on. I guess much of that time has accidentally been in areas with lots of Catholics and lots of not so evangelical protestants.)

I'm going to go out on a limb and be a little controversial here: Just for reference I'm a non-American with a very strong scientific background and also a non-confrontational and personal Christian.

For me, some American and a few European atheists appear to be as devout as the most strongly religious people I know. They are judgemental of others' beliefs, are absolutely convinced that their views are correct and disparage anyone who is even open or agnostic towards philosophical questions like whether there could be anything external to the Universe. These people dismiss any branch of rationality that is not directly measurable or quantifiable, and on one occasion I had to correct one by saying "yes, philosophy does actually serve a purpose, as a guide for which scientific questions we should tackle next".

That's a negative connotation I get when I meet someone who goes out of their way to let me know they're atheist. (This is a generalization which of course needs to be carefully balanced).

Then there's my brother who as a young adult filling in some sort of form asked "Mum, what religion am I?"

If you have to ask like that, you'd best put nothing.

In Canada the second largest group by religion is "no religious affiliation" http://globalnews.ca/news/544591/the-second-largest-religiou...

In BC over 35% are non-religious. In Vancouver it's over 41% with only 5,000 more Christians than "non-religious". http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/dp-pd/prof/details/p...

The first two graphics provide a great illustration of how misleading population statistics are once you reduce the fidelity to the state level.

"No Presence" cuts a huge swath through the believably near-unanimously Christian (and scant populated) middle.

That entire trend is conspicuously absent from the state map, which basically lacks the capacity to distinguish between urban and rural through most of the country, despite that being probably the most salient cultural divide.

I completely fail to understand the "Adherents reported" explanation on the per-county map, which is on the majority of counties.

Exactly. The explanation seems to invoke Zoroastrianism, but not in any sensible way.

You might assume that pale yellow refers to Zoroastrians, but that seems unlikely, given its predominance in counties throughout the country and lack of registering at all on the state map. It looks like a pattern more similar to "No Presence," which I take to mean there simply aren't any discoverable congregants other than Christians in certain vast stretches of the, uh, Northern Rocky Heartland (for lack of a good regional descriptor).

Apparently there is one county (out of 3000+) where Christianity is not the predominant religious tradition. I'd be curious to know which county that was...

I've been trying to dig through their data to answer your question, but I don't have SPSS/STATA, and the SPSS viewer I downloaded was pretty ineffective. It's here if you want to try and find it:

http://www.thearda.com/Archive/Files/Downloads/RCMSCY10_DL2....

Emporia, Virginia. It's actually an independent city rather than a county (a historical quirk of Virginia), and Christians as a whole still outnumber Muslims, but there the Muslim congregation is larger than any one denomination of Christians.

http://www.thearda.com/rcms2010/r/c/51/rcms2010_51595_county...

I'm dubious about the meaningfulness of broad terms like "Christian", "Muslim", etc., because of their coarse granularity. I'm not religious, but from what I observe, I don't think the "Christian" crowd of Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, and Unitarian Universalists would say they believe the Same Thing. I'm guessing that if you asked a C of E whether they were of the same religion as Jehovah's Witnesses, they'd probably look at you funny. Ditto for Shia and Sunni. Such distinctions have great social relevance everywhere. Consider Latin Americans: Catholic vs Evangelical (and that in itself is already a ludicrous simplification) has massive post-colonial, political, and social ramifications; to lump them all as "Christians" is to throw away so much information. It would also be interesting to see a break-down that included people who culturally identify with a "faith" but who are non-practicing (like so many of my Jewish friends).

Interesting that they count Mormons as Christians: I would guess that many non-Mormon Christians would not agree with that.

It makes sense to count people as what they consider themselves. Otherwise you are going to open a whole can of worms: protestants may not consider catholics christian, sunni muslims might want to exclude shia muslims etc.

This is an excellent point. I'm a Mormon, and from our perspective, it's clear that we are Christians, but others have disputed it. At that point, there is no authority to decide where we fit.

As you said, there are plenty of similar cases, so it's easier to just count everyone as what they claim to be.

In that case, I think it makes sense to define the groups as "Mormons" and "non-Mormon Christians" or something like that. It doesn't make sense to define a group where half the members of the group think the other half are heretics.

Why single Mormons out? Why not exclude Rastafari who also consider themselves Christians (but are not considered Christians by many non-Rastafari Christians)?

Heck, why even include Protestants? Historically, "orthodox" Catholics consider them to be heretics as well[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rastafari

[1] and among some pockets of Catholicism, this belief holds strong to this day

I didn't mean to advocate singling Mormons out specifically. Like I said, my proposal is to define groups such that each group's members all consider each other to be orthodox.

> Heck, why even include Protestants? Historically, "orthodox" Catholics consider them to be heretics as well[1].

When I listed "Mormons" and "non-Mormon Christians," I didn't mean to imply that those would literally be the only two groups within Christianity. I was just giving an example of separating people into groups based on mutually-recognized orthodoxy.

Or why even include Catholics, as there's a significant minority of Protestants who consider them to be a false church engaging in polytheism - asking saints for intercession with God on their behalf looks a lot like praying to them from the outside.

But it also makes sense to define religious groups such that each member of a group considers all other members orthodox. If a third party defines a bunch of people to be in the same religious group, but half of that group thinks the other half are heretical, I think the third party should define the groups in a different way.

> But it also makes sense to define religious groups such that each member of a group considers all other members orthodox.

Hah. Good luck with that—you'd just end up with a million little groups of one or two. The whole point of forming a sub-religion is that new people consider the old people heretical or unorthodox or vice versa.

> Hah. Good luck with that—you'd just end up with a million little groups of one or two.

There's no way that's accurate. Plenty of Protestant Christian denominations recognize other Protestant denominations as orthodox, and I suspect the same goes between many congregations of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.

> The whole point of forming a sub-religion is that new people consider the old people heretical or unorthodox or vice versa.

Not at all true, at least within Protestant Christian denominations.

It only makes sense to treat people as individuals. Otherwise, what if one single Lutheran views all Baptists as heretics. I can guarantee that such a person exists.

Are you going to create a new category for that one person? What will you call it? "Lutherans who don't consider Baptists to be Christian"?

"I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know." - Thomas Jefferson

You point out an obvious problem, but any method of grouping is equally or more susceptible to this same problem. In practice you would probably look try to look either at the stated official beliefs of sufficiently large religious groups, or at polls of people who self-identify as an adherent to a certain religious group. It's certainly never going to perfectly objective.

This is inherent to the very idea of this graph, which is to list religious groups rather than individuals. Any grouping will necessarily group together people who don't share identical beliefs. I'm just proposing one way to do so, because I think the most pragmatically important feature of a religious group isn't the name of the group or the name they use for their deities, but rather who they consider to be orthodox.

> but any method of grouping is equally or more susceptible to this same problem

Not really. If you are looking to group people into what group they identify with (which is what this poll actually was), the only way to do it would be to ask them, individually.

> Any grouping will necessarily group together people who don't share identical beliefs.

Huh, anyone who self-identifies as "Christian" believes that category describes them better than any other. You can't go into everyone's head and determine what constitutes the totality of their religion or philosophy. It's just not possible.

> I think the most pragmatically important feature of a religious group isn't the name of the group or the name they use for their deities, but rather who they consider to be orthodox.

I think the only pragmatically important feature of a religious group is who considers themselves to be a part of it.

> Huh, anyone who self-identifies as "Christian" believes that category describes them better than any other.

Yes, but most would probably also self-identify with more specific groups, like "Lutheran," more vague groups, like "spiritual," and overlapping groups, like "fundamentalist" or "evangelical." My proposal would not group a person into a group with which they do not self-identify.

> I think the only pragmatically important feature of a religious group is who considers themselves to be a part of it.

Again, I'm not disagreeing with that. I was just assuming that no groupings would go against any member's self-identification, because that seems very obvious.

One approach to this problem is to look at where certain religions branched off from one another.

Mormonism branched off from Protestant Christianity.

So if you zoom out far enough, it is in the Christian "family," historically speaking.

That way all Christians are Jews.

Well, I'm sure there are sects which disclaim each others' faith. For everyone else, they are close enough that they're Christian. When you are very similar to someone, the differences appear magnified. Zoom out and they are dwarfed by bigger differences.

"Christian" is an ambiguous term. Mormons qualify as Christian by some definitions ("worships Jesus of Nazareth," "considers self Christian") but not others ("adheres to the Nicene Creed," "considers the Old and New Testaments to be the only sacred books").

In Lake Wobegon even the atheists are Lutheran.

It's incredibly hard to label any religion as "Christian" and have that label approved by other religions labeled as "Christian". It's an exercise in futility, which makes those kinds of charts mostly useless. This one on the other hand is pretty interesting.

http://funki.com.ua/ru/portfolio/lab/world-religions-tree/

religion is complicated...

It's usually fairly straight forward to see if any two groups believe the same things by asking questions and seeing how they answer. If two groups believe differently about fundamental issues, they are not the same group.

Here are 3 such questions:

1) Who or what is God?

Christians: there is one God. there will only ever be one God. God has always been God. God is the creator of all things.

Athiests: there is no such thing as God or gods.

Mormons: there are many gods. You can become a god. God was once a man like us. Jesus is the spirit brother of Lucifer.

2: What is the afterlife?

Christians: There is an eternal afterlife. People who have faith in God will go to heaven. Others will go to hell.

Athiests: There is no afterlife. When you die, that's it.

Mormons: There is an eternal afterlife. Mormons in good standing will go to the highest heaven, and may eventually become gods. "Good" people go to a middle heaven. "Bad" people go to hell.

3) What is salvation, or the righteous life?

Christians: Salvation is by faith in God. Good works are a result of a life changed by God.

Athiests: There is nothing to be saved from. Live as you see fit while you're here.

Mormons: Salvation is by good works and by performing certain rituals. these activities can continue in the afterlife in order to become a god. You can be saved in the afterlife if a Mormon in good standing (in the here and now) baptizes you by proxy in a special temple ceremony (baptism of the dead).

Now, why one group with very different beliefs than a 2nd group would claim to be part of that 2nd group - that's another question.

The presence of Bahai'i in SC is rather unexpected. From the county map it looks like they are mostly in the Myrtle Beach / Georgetown area.

Really cool to see the Baha'i faith mentioned in something like this, and I was really surprised to see South Carolina as the epicenter. For those interested, our House of Worship in the US is located in Illinois: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bah%C3%A1'%C3%AD_House_of_Worsh...

If you get a chance I highly recommend visiting this location. I drive by it often and have walked around it a few times. It is a breathtaking building.

Arizona and Delaware are the only two states where Hindus is the second most popular religion. That's very interesting, considering these states are not too close to each other.

would be interesting if they used lightness and darkness to show what percentage of the population was that religion

Anyone else getting a 404 on mobile?

Yes, 404 on my phone.

If you are interested in why Islam is so successful and already the second-largest religion in so many states: http://www.inquiryintoislam.com/2010/07/why-is-islam-so-succ...

When I first saw this comment I thought it was attempting to proselytize for Islam. But I followed the link anyway, and it turns out to be quite the opposite. Interesting read, actually.

Standard islamaphobic narrative - i.e support extremists in their claim to own the religion. Ignore other Muslims as fakers.

Please state with what you dont agree with in the article instead of crying out propaganda words like islamophobia. Are there factual errors in it?

You really want to play the selective Quranic quote game? Fine I'll indulge you with one example:

"Permission to spread the religion by war" - here you've already discredited yourself by sourcing the hate mongering religionofpeace.com. But anyways the sourced page at http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/Quran/023-violence.htm says there is no defensive historical context to the verse at Quran (2:191-193). Wrong. Relocating to Medina did not save the emerging Muslim polity from attacks and raids and from the Meccans. Low status followers who couldn't leave Mecca were still being beaten, tortured and killed. But the crucial bit of false messaging in regards to this verse happens here:

"And fight them until there is no more Fitnah [disbelief and worshipping of others along with Allah]"

Ha! The naive reader might say "gosh thats pretty much a recipe for constant warfare isn't it?". But Fitna doesn't mean that, it more accurately translates to "discord promoting actions/ state of destablizing disharmony" - think Russia's recent actions in the eastern Ukraine.

A similar dynamic is at play with many of the other points on the site. Misleading interpretations or interpretations favored by extremist scholars are put forth as the true face of Islam. More reasonable rulings by more qualified scholars apparently don't count. Devout Muslims who have no problem in being a harmonious part of diverse societies apparently don't count.

Because that might undermine the central fallacious Islamaphobic narrative: It's not bad people, it's bad ideology.

But it is bad people. There is enough room in any ideology to be an asshole.

I'm not going to do anymore than this, because a) I'm not qualified b) I don't have the energy and c) I doubt you're looking for a real debate, propagandists usually are not.

As a postscript I really don't get the end game of these arguments, but it seems to be: "can't we just all come together and hate Islam? Can't you see that's the only way to fix the world?"

It wasn't me who wrote the page whose URL I gave but please don't play the "the verses are taken out of the context" game with me. You could have fooled most people five years back but most common people now have learned enough from Islam to see behind such protective "arguments".

Hacker News isn't the place where religion should be discussed but I urge anyone to read the Quran - best in a simplified form like in "An abridged Koran" (by Bill Warner) where the verses have been reordered chronologically (as they were in the beginning) so everybody can read those verses together with the context of the life of Muhammad and see why your "Muslims were attacked and had the right to defend themselves" is nothing but a blatant lie and also the blue-print for the Jihad carried out by Hamas, Taliban, Boko Haram and other islamic terror groups that just follow the example of their violent prophet.

>>Hacker News isn't the place where religion should be discussed.

I see, you wanted to do some drive by propaganda without being called out on it. Sorry.

Muhammad was a political and military leader of his faith community as well as a spiritual one. I see no reason why any Muslim has to apologize for actions he took in those capacities. And context matters even if it upsets your little narrative. It is the basis of the numerous condemnations of extremist violence put forth by qualified Islamic authorities.

What, that does exist? Give me an example of a major islamic authority who condems violence and intolerance against non-muslims who refuse to convert to Islam or pay the Jizya when they are under islamic rule.

I'm sure he will come back with some example of the Ahmadiyya sect who isn't recognized by any of the main schools of Islam.

what the hell do you mean "already" Islam predates the US by a thousand years.

You do know that there lived people in northern America before the US was created and even before Islam or even Christianity existed?

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