The geography of religious diversity in the United States

Religious pluralism is an important and contested topic within the literature on religion. This article explores the spatiality of religious diversity in the United States. It opens with a summary of major conceptual perspectives on the causes and consequences of religious diversity. Second, to unpack the geography of U.S. religious diversity, the article uses Glenmary and Polis data for 2000 to construct four indexes of diversity and presents these results with both choropleth maps and Dorling cartograms. It explores the relation between the distribution of denominations and county population size. The analysis reveals that the most diverse regions include the Pacific Northwest, a broad belt stretching from Denver to Pittsburgh, and central Florida, and the least diverse parts are dominated by Mormons, Baptists, and Catholics. Indexes more sophisticated than the simple number of denominations per county are sensitive to the internal configuration of adherents and reflect a more complex relationship in which population size is not assured of generating greater degrees of religious diversity.