Yeah, I would just reemphasize once again, some of you are being rather unfair in your criticisms of my OP. You say I need solid data to back up my point. But what makes you think I don’t have that? Actually, a few years back I was watching something on tv about this very subject. Do you know what the most common religion is in the US? Not Roman Catholic–that’s second. Baptist, because so many people belong to that religion in the South. Also, where I live, the Baptist religion is the dominant religion of African Americans for much the same reason.
And finally, I think it is obvious the Baptist religion is the dominant religion in the South. And I don’t think I need any statistics to prove that:). If any statistics say different, they’re just plain wrong. Sorry:).
According to every reliable statistic i can find, Catholics do indeed make up the largest single denominational group in the United States. In fact, according to the US Census Bureau, Catholics have actually been increasing their lead over the past 20 years, with the number of Americans who self-identify as Catholics growing faster than the number who self-identify as Baptists:
Those figures above are based on the ways that people describe their own religious adherence. If you look at the numbers claimed by the churches themselves, the Catholics are even further ahead:
Catholics: 68.12 million
Baptists (various Baptist denominations): about 33 million
And note further that all these figures above rely on counting all the different Baptist churches together as a single category. But doing that risks downplaying some of the very real conflicts and tensions within the Baptist faith that led to the formation of all these different Baptist groups in the first place. While these differences are, in many cases, political and organizational rather than doctrinal, the fact is that the Baptists don’t all fit together very comfortably under a single umbrella.
Jim B., here’s a further suggestion: If you have a question to ask, just ask it. Don’t do what you did in your OP, starting by telling about how almost every state seemed to have many people who belonged to a variety of denominations. (Incidentally, the word you’re looking for is “denominations,” not religions. Every group you list belongs to the Christian religion.) You implied that you had visited all those states and knew by personal experience that there was a variety of denominations in all those states. You then stated that there is no such noticeable variety of denominations in the southern states. You then finally got around to asking the question that you really wanted to know the answer to, which was how the South happened to end up having so many Baptists.
If that was the question you wanted the answer to, you should just ask it straight away. When you start your OP with a rambling tour of your experiences around the U.S., you run the risk that other posters will assume that this is what your question is about. Your question is actually limited and quite reasonable: Why are there so many Baptists in the South? It’s not true that nearly everyone in the South is a Baptist, since actually there is quite a substantial amount of people belonging to other denominations, but it is true that in the southern states Baptists are a majority in many places and the clear plurality in most other places.
For your second point, I will try to remember that in the future:). (BTW, I think information I heard on tv makes the perfect data, esp. for the informal nature of these boards.)
Well, yes, that is what they said. I don’t know, it might have been a while ago when the numbers of Catholics hadn’t surpassed the Baptist one yet. (And you have to admit, I should point out, that there are still alot of Baptists in our country.) Yes, I think seeing something on tv could pass as data. Hey, even Wikipedia is sometimes wrong;).
The number of Catholics surpassed the number of Baptists over 20 years ago, so if the claim made by your TV was correct when the show was produced, the show itself must have been pretty damn old.
I have never denied that there are “a lot of Baptists in our country.” It was me, remember, who posted the actual figures showing that there are about 36 million self-identified Baptists in the United States.
Yes, Wikipedia is sometimes wrong.
I didn’t get my figures from Wikipedia. I got them from the US Census Bureau, a government agency whose whole raison d’etre is counting stuff and collecting data about America and Americans.
