Perhaps the most important concept in the study of the geography of American religion has been that of regionalism.
The idea that different geographic sections of indigenous America, the English colonies, are the United States have been characterized by distinctive religious features has helped historians and cultural geographers to make sense of what might otherwise seem an overwhelmingly complex American religious scene.
Regional patterns developed even before the first European settlers arrived, for the variety of religious patterns created by Indian groups responded in part to local geographic and climatic features. Thus one can speak of “northern” and “southern” patterns, each in turn comprising many different kinds of belief and practice. Cultural anthropologists have distinguished several broad culture regions in pre-Columbian North America, each of which might well be considered a religious region as well.
European colonization brought new religious traditions to America that were less directly tied to American physical geography but nonetheless contributed important and enduring regional patterns to American religious life. The Russian Orthodoxy brought across the Bering Sea remains a major religious presence among Alaskan natives, far more prominent there than elsewhere in the United States, and Russian settlement, Orthodox and otherwise, continues to concentrate along the Pacific; the strength of Catholicism (both Mexican and Native American) in the American Southwest testifies to the continuing impact of Spanish colonialism on the American religious map; and French Catholic Louisiana remains as a vestige of France’s once large Mississippi Valley presence.
American church historians have long noted that, in the English colonies, Puritan Congregationalism was concentrated in New England, Anglicanism (the forerunner of Episcopalianism) in Virginia, Maryland, New York, and Connecticut, Presbyterianism in the backcountry, Quakerism in Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley, and German groups in western Pennsylvania.
Many of these patterns persist, though they have been overlain by newer ones and no longer define their respective regions.During the 19th century, revivalism, religious innovation, immigration, and westward expansion produced new regional patterns that were clearly visible by 1900 and have formed the basis for the current American religious regions that scholars have widely—if cautiously and provisionally—recognized. Seven major regions and several subregions were suggested by cultural geographer Wilbur Zelinsky in 1961.
The first is New England, north and east of New York state, characterized by large numbers of Congregationalists, Unitarian-Universalists, Episcopalians, and Catholics and a relative lack of Methodist, Presbyterian, and German groups. The Midland region to its south stretches westward from the mid-Atlantic states to the Rocky Mountains. This territory, unlike New England, abounds in Methodists, Presbyterians, and German groups, as well as Baptists, Episcopalians, and Disciples of Christ. A Pennsylvania German subregion within it is heavily populated by Amish, Mennonite, and related groups. A third region, the Upper Middle Western, occupies the nation’s middle third longitudinally and upper third latitudinally, encompassing the area extending westward from Lake Michigan through the Dakotas. Its distinguishing features, products of 19th-century migration, immigration, and settlement, are the dominance of northern European Lutherans, a strong contingent of Catholics, and, due to westward migration from New England during the early part of the century, a significant Congregational presence. Baptists have predominated in the Southern region since the rise of evangelicalism in the 19th century, but Methodists have constituted a large minority since the same period, and Holiness and Pentecostal groups that grew out of both have been conspicuous since their emergence. The South contains four subregions: the North Carolina Piedmont, notable for the Presbyterian, Quaker, and German groups that have occupied the area since the colonial period; Peninsular Florida, occupied by the hodgepodge of groups that have migrated there since the late 19th century; French Catholic Louisiana, a vestige of France’s colonization of Canada and the Mississippi Valley; and Texas German, the result of 19th-century immigration.
Utah and the intermontane area became in the mid-19th century a Mormon region that remains perhaps the most distinct and uniform of all the American religious regions. The Spanish Catholic region, the oldest of the existing religious regions, is distinguished, obviously, by its concentration of Catholics of Hispanic descent as well as of Native American Catholics, and points to the religious culture that predominates on the other side of the nation’s nearby border with Mexico. The final region is the Western, which is like the Peninsular Florida subregion in being settled largely by migrants from other regions of the country and lacking any one clearly dominant group or cluster of dominant groups as a result.
The concept of American religious regions has its limitations. For one thing, other sorts of patterns coexist with and cut across them. Urban areas, for example, have been perennial exceptions to the general rules of their regions, while certain religious groups are notable for either a largely urban presence (such as Jews, Catholics, Episcopalians, and Unitarian-Universalists) or a largely rural one (Churches of God, Disciples of Christ, Baptists, Amish, and Mennonites). Another problem with the existing regional schema is that, having been sketched before 1965 changes in immigration laws stimulated trans-Pacific Asian migration and in the absence of reliable statistics on African-American denominations, they do not reflect the presence of these Americans. They are based on the increasingly inaccurate portrait of the United States as a nation of white Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Perhaps the conventional schema can be stretched to incorporate the far more complex reality: accounting for black denominations, for example, might not change the Baptist-Methodist-Pentecostal definition of the South; Eastern Orthodoxy might simply be mixed into existing portraits of the Midlands and Upper Midwest; and the definition of the West, especially California, might be changed to include metaphysical religious movements, countercultural experimentation, and its Asian population.
But perhaps such changes will require a more substantial redrawing of the map of American religious regions.Finally, the enduring distinctiveness of the religious regions that took form during the 19th and 20th centuries appears less than certain at the dawn of the 21st. Many observers have suggested that mass culture, the mass media, and interregional migration have operated to homogenize American life and erase regional religious differences. Regional distinctiveness continues to have its defenders, but whether future atlases like this one treat American religious regions as anything more than a matter of historical interest remains to be seen.
