Religious homogeneity in small (or large) town America

In My Humble Opinion
1

One of the villages very close to my home has fewer than 2000 people, and it has 4 churches. It has had one of these churches for over 40 years, and it has had the other 3 churches for much longer, some over 150 years. The 4th church arose when one of the original church congregations grew too large.

The big news in the village is the fact that the Presbyterian church dropped its affiliation with the Presbys to join the Evangelical Presbyterian church.

The other churches in the village are the Orthodox Presbyterian church and two churches belonging to the Reformed denomination.

The next nearest village to me has a few more than 2000 people, and also has 4 churches:
Another Reformed church
A Christian Reformed congregation
A Presbyterian congregation (no hint as to whether they’re tempted to convert to Evangelical Presbyterian)
Another Orthodox Presbyterian congregation

The next small hamlet over is so tiny it has only one house of worship, a Reformed church. It’s been there for over 150 years, and great-great grandpop Mercotan worshipped there. (Grandpop Mercotan broke with them over their disapproval of his marrying Grandma Mercotan, who went to a Christian Reformed church, and hence was not of the true faith. :rolleyes: )

So the 9 houses of worship closest to me consist of 9 Calvinist churches.

In the early days of settlement, when emigrants from The Netherlands were building their homes in my area, a passing US-born citizen noted that “as soon as two dutchmen settle down, the first thing they do is build a church. When three dutchmen settle down, the first thing they do is build two churches.”

I’m not interested in throwing stones at my kin who still practice the faiths of my forebears. I am interested in hearing from other folks who perhaps grew up in, or knew about, areas in the US where there was a comparable lack of religious diversity. Share if you would, what your particular monodenominational areas were like!

(Yes, yes, I know that the individual faiths mentioned above in my area don’t consider themselves to be the same! There’s always lively debate around here over which are the “right” churches, and why those other ones are ‘wrong’! But I’m sure you get my drift.)

2

My home town is about 1300 people right on the Louisiana/Border (LA side) but the whole area is the same way. Southern Baptists are the biggest by far with some Methodists (that is what I grew up as) and some Pentecostal/Assembly of God type churches for the loons. Louisiana is heavily Catholic in the South but not where I grew up. We had about 20 Catholics from 3 families that I know of and they shared a circuit Priest with other tiny churches (actually, I would guess that the Mexican illegals working in agriculture were Catholic but I don’t think they went to church).

The area is 100% Christian as far as I know. The thing about some of the denominations there is that they tend to splinter with alarming regularity. The congregations have fights every few years it seems so parts of them pack up and go start a new church right down the road. Over a few decades the number of churches multiply so you end up with an absurd number in a small area. My home town must have 15 churches for those 1300 people and there are plenty more over the Texas line.

3

Altoona, Pennsylvania, has a LOT of churches. Most of the basic Protestant denominations are represented, along with a few of the oddball non-denominational Bible Churches, at least one synagogue, an Orthodox church, and even a Christian Science Reading Room. But it’s DOMINATED by Roman Catholic churches. There were an awful lot of Italians, Poles, and Bavarians working on the railroad. There is an extensive parochial league in school sports (though it’s consolidated a bit by now, with the central Catholic middle school that was opened in the mid-90s). Really an amazing concentration for a city of less than 50,000 people.

We used to go camping in rural areas of Pennsylvania in the summers, and finding a Catholic church out there could be a bit challenging. I was always amazed at the difference between Altoona and most of the rest of PA between Philly and Pittsburgh.

4

Shagnasty once again nails the rural Louisiana experience.

I grew up in central Louisiana in a town of around 2000. There was a Methodist church somewhere around, and you could find the Pentecostal church by backtracking the line of trucks heading to someone else’s place to watch football on Sundays. There were some Catholics in the next town up the road, but I never found out where they went to church. I think they were afraid someone would burn it down if they let on where it was.

And there were about a dozen Southern Baptist churches. Oddly enough, almost all of them were First Baptist Churches. Baptist churches reproduce by fission, you see. They grow until a big enough chunk of the congregation can’t stand the rest of them (minimum critical mass seems to be a congregation of two), then they split. Schism was practically a spectator sport in my old stomping grounds. Of course, having split, each side is convinced that they are the real congregation, and that other crew is just a bunch of hellbound sinners (after all, they think you should put pickles in potato salad). Thus, each side winds up keeping the name, maybe with a new location tagged on the end when they set up shop somewhere else.

I think my family were the only non-Christians in the area (we’ve always been an odd assortment of agnostics, atheists, and neopagans). I self-identified as a Wiccan in high school, but everyone seemed to think it was some Christian denomination they’d never heard of. (“Wiccan? Ain’t that kind of like Lutheran?”) I found it amusingly bizarre that I had to intervene between Catholic friends and various Baptists who thought they were devil-worshipers (“They drink blood at that there Mass of theirs!”), but no one ever accused me of anything.

5

I grew up “East of St. Paul” in Minnesota. While it wasn’t quite monodenominational, Lutheran churches outnumbered other churches. When my parents played softball in a multi-denominational league, the roster looked like this “King of Kings Lutheran” “United Methodist Church” “Other Lutheran” “Baptists” “Local Community Lutheran” “Catholics”, etc.

Nowadays, the church I grew up in is moderately massive, and I think a significant part of it’s growth is the fact that it’s the largest non-Lutheran church for miles around. It is part of a denomination, it isn’t a non-denominational community church(and since I no longer live there, I don’t know if there is one in the area).

The funny thing is, many people who visit the town take one look at the steeple of the church I grew up in and say “Isn’t that a Lutheran church?” Nope. Built by Germans 150 years ago, but not built by Lutherans.

6

I grew up in the same general region as QtM, but in the larger city nearby; one of my parents came from his town. When they moved to the city, they stuck with the same denomination (Dutch Reformed) even though they were actually fairly liberal compared to the church’s teachings. I suspect they were sticking with what they were used to, even though there was more variety in this city than in their old towns.

(It wasn’t until my sister and I were teenagers that we switched churches, after my sister and I began protesting having to attend such a church. My parents tried out the United Church of Christ church that had some friends of mine attending, and who I’d gone on summer “youth field trips” with; they ended up switching us to this church. Considering this church was on the far other end of the spectrum when it comes to liberalness, I had more justification for my belief that they were open to this but sticking with the old church because it was what they knew.)

7

Once again, the Protestant Reformation has reared its ugly head, this time it’s in the South Texas town where my sister lives.

Alsmost the entire West side of the town attends the same Catholic church and graduated from the Catholic school next door. The other half of the town is Protestant (mostly Methodist, if I recall correctly.) Things came to a head when the local school district had a meeting to discuss what to include when replacing/rennovating the old public high school. Between the calls that the school needed a new gym, a new stadium and a swimming pool, someone suggested that they do a budget analysis before promising anything. That person happened to be Catholic and God help us all. The town has been in a furor over this for years and nothing has been done as both sides snipe at each other. What is forgotten is that the school taxes are already that the maximum allowed by the state and half of the taxpayers send their kids to a private school. Any money that could be there is already there and more.

That said, Sis is Catholic, and when visiting it seems as if the entire town is as well. It’s nice to visit a place where everyone knows each other and sees each other at least once a week. Also, the kids all go to the same dancehall on Fridays which is managed by the Knights of Columbus. Apart from the school issue,* religion isn’t a political issue and there seems to be room for debate and some room for dissent.
*And abortion, but that would be a BIG digression and isn’t a major issue in their daily lives.

8

We’ll have none of your filthy “homogeneity” in our town, Bub. Or any other long words that we can’t understand.

9

A little North of there. Lutherans and Catholics. We didn’t have anything else - just Lutherans and Catholics.

My favorite small town (and large city) splinter-that-is-really-big-on the-inside (and not understandable from the outside) is the Polish Catholic Church across the street from the Italian Catholic Church. The Germans go to the next town over to the German Catholic Church because they’d rather drive ten miles than go to church with the Poles.

This would be vaguely understandable had all these churches been built post Vatican II by immigrants wanting to hear mass in their native language…but these are all pre-Vatican II churches (and the whole phenomonon seems to have died out since my childhood) when all the masses were in Latin.

10

I’m never really paid attention, but around here we only seem to have Roman Catholics (Acadians) and Baptists (everyone else), with maybe an Anglican church or two. And joy of all joys, of the two RC churches close to us (Mom’s Acadian, making us Catholic–Dad’s not affiliated with anything), each having two masses a week, there’s only one English mass between them. Fortunately I’ve never really been a practicing Catholic, and when I do go it’s the closer church with the English mass.

Granted, this is a pretty rural area, so I suppose we’re lucky to have any choices at all.

11

Any Wisconsinites here who can tell me what a Free Methodist is? I noticed churches by that name in the vicinity of Shullsburg, where my great-great grandfather used to dig zinc.

12

But is public heterodoxy any better? Practiced by unmarried people, in front of our children?

13

I grew up in a small town on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. We Episcopalians were the newcomers – our church was started while I was in grade school. In addition to us, there were 3 Presbyterian churches, including one of the oldest one in town, one large Catholic church and a smaller one one town over, a Methodist church, and at least a couple of Lutheran Churches. Since then, they’ve added an Assembly of God, if memory serves.

Pittsburgh’s heavily Catholic, with a lot of various Eastern Orthodox churches, Presbyterians, Lutherans, etc. Around here, it seems like every restaurant in town except the vegetarian ones offers a fish special during Lent. I know of one Baptist church near where I live (I’m still in Pittsburgh). I still remember being called a liar once on another message board when I wrote we really didn’t have Fundamentalists around when I was growing up. It’s true, though. On the other hand, it would be rather odd to me, though, to be somewhere where the local fire department wasn’t having a fish fry on Ash Wednesday. To each his own, I suppose.

14

:eek: There’s a whole inner circle of hell reserved for public heterodoxists.

15

Here in the backwoods of KY, we have a Catholic church that makes up 5% of the population, max. Another 10% or so (tops) are some non-mainstream Christian denomination–Jehovah’s Witness, Seventh-Day Adventist, and others you’d probably have to look up.

The rest (85%, at least) are some form of mainstream Protestant, mostly Baptist, Methodist, Church of God, and Church of Christ. There are tons of individual churches, most of which formed by splintering from another congregation so long ago that no one remembers why. You’d be hard-pressed to find any big theological differences between them, and 95% of the people who attend probably can’t tell you what’s different about them and the church down the road.

Non-Christians are pretty much nonexistent.

16

Thanks for the input, guys.

But it seems that places like my home, where a bunch of Calvinists split hairs finer and finer and no other churches are in either of my nearby towns, are the significant exception. Here, no catholics, no methodists, no baptists, no episcopalians! Just Calvinists!

Granted, a 12-15 mile drive would bring you to other communities where you could find catholics, methodists, and the like. There was even a ‘jew church’ (my kinsman’s term, not mine) about 20 miles away! But the villages in my township are very ethnically ‘pure’ (tho that’s slowly changing), and pretty monolithic in matters of faith.

17

Well, it was obviously predestined.

18

You Tulip! You are so totally depraved! :wink:

19

Over here Catholics make up the majority. My town, for instance, has 3 large parishes and one smaller. My parish is one of the largest in the area. The adjoining towns, as well as the immediate towns beyond, are also heavily Catholic.

The mainline Protestant churches are also here. However, their congregations don’t come anywhere close to the typical parish.

Evangelicalism is still quite a small movement here. Their churches tend to be located in those areas which have seen better days and a lot of them seem to cater to recent immigrants from the Carribbean or South America. I could very well be wrong on this last part, but it seems that way.

20

<Scar>You have no idea…</Scar>