Jay Fitzgerald (among others) points to a new map - put out by these folks - showing that contrary to word of a red state-blue state religion divide, people in the Southeast are less religiously adherent than people in Massachusetts.
It’s always good to match up political shorthand against empirical evidence, but color me unpersuaded. The map, after all, is simply of adherence to a given religious organization - defined by the churches themselves - and doesn’t speak to the quality or nature of religious beliefs, behavior or ideology. As one commenter to Geitner Simmons’ post responds:
These maps don’t come from Census data; in fact if you look at the US Census page on religion, you’ll see that they’re prevented by law from asking mandatory questions about religious affiliation.The Glenmary Research Center primary uses self-reported membership counts, but if you look at the Census’ Statistical Abstract you’ll see the problem with that method: churches each have their own definition of “member”, and compared to the American Religious Identification Survey’s definition of “anyone who self-identifies as a member of that church”, the churches themselves may be overstating or understating their membership totals by millions.
To my eye, much of the map can be explained by two overriding tendencies: 1) most Americans, everywhere, are theists whether they’re especially religious or not; and 2) smaller Protestant denominations in the Southeast have a tendency to undercount while the Catholic church offers a very full count of those who might reasonably be considered Catholic, including those not very practicing.
In short, I don’t see anything here to refute the correlation some have suggested lies with frequency of churchgoing and Democrat/Republican voting behavior in 2000/2004. But the question I have is: where was that correlation was originally reported?
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