Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox.
In the majority of nonmetropolitan, or rural, counties, the most popular Christian tradition is evangelicalism, according to my analysis of data from the U.S. Religion Census, a county-level, once-per-decade dataset that reports the number of congregations and adherents in American faith groups. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that rural people are more religious than their urban and suburban counterparts. More on that later.
In 62% of nonmetropolitan counties and 58% of metropolitan counties, Evangelicalism was the dominant Christian denomination in 2020, the most recent year of available data. Evangelicalism was the most popular tradition in 60% of all U.S. counties at large.
The following map shows the most popular Christian tradition by county. I categorized each county by calculating the percentage of religious adherents that belonged to five of the largest Christian traditions – Black Protestant, Catholic, Evangelical, Latter-Day Saints (LDS), and Mainline Protestants, or protestants belonging to some of the oldest Christian denominations in the United States and Canada, including United Methodists and Presbyterians, among others.
The term ‘adherents’ refers to individuals who regularly attend a specific congregation.
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I assigned each county a mutually exclusive label based on the tradition where the greatest share of adherents belong. Many of the five Christian traditions listed above, including Mainline Protestant and Evangelical, are umbrella terms that contain several denominations beneath them. For example, Evangelical denominations include institutions like the Southern Baptist Convention and the Assemblies of God, among many others.
You can read more about the U.S. Religion Census terms and methodology at the Association of Religion Data Archives, the repository where the data is housed.
Catholicism or Evangelicalism are the most popular Christian traditions in 85% of counties, while hotspots of other traditions are concentrated regionally. Mainline Protestant is the most popular Christian tradition in 30% of nonmetropolitan counties in the Midwest, for example.
The LDS church is the most popular tradition in the entire state of Utah, as well as many of the rural counties adjacent to Utah, including White Pine County, Nevada, where 54% of all religious adherents are LDS.
Eleven out of the 14 counties where Black Protestants make up the plurality of religious adherents are nonmetropolitan. These counties are concentrated in the Black Belt of the American South.
As a percentage of the total population, Catholicism is the most popular Christian tradition in the country, accounting for nearly 40% of all religious adherents. That’s because 85% of Catholic adherents are concentrated in cities that have populations of at least 250,000 residents.
Traditions Across County Types
Evangelicals account for a disproportionate share of the population in nonmetropolitan counties. About 20% of evangelicals live in nonmetropolitan counties, even though residents of these counties only account for 14% of the total population. In nonmetropolitan counties, about half of all religious adherents are evangelical, compared to only about 31% of metro religious adherents.
You might think that means nonmetropolitan residents are more religious, but that’s actually not the case. (That is, if we’re measuring religiosity as the share of the population that regularly attends religious services. There are other ways to measure religiosity, like surveys that ask respondents about their personal beliefs. But the U.S. Religion Census is essentially a headcount of congregants, not an individual survey.)
The nation’s largest cities actually had the highest religious adherence rates, making up just about half of the population in metropolitan counties with populations greater than one million residents. The overall religious adherence rate in nonmetropolitan counties was 48%, meanwhile.
These differences are small and within the margin of error. Nonmetropolitan residents aren’t necessarily more religious than their urban or suburban counterparts, but when they are religious adherents, they are more likely to be evangelical. At least that’s what this dataset seems to suggest.
The post Rural Americans Are More Evangelical, but not Necessarily More Religious appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
