At church, in the dance hall and on the gridiron

Chapter 1
A geography of American worship

The story of the Tower of Babel, you will recall, involves God stymieing the construction of a heavens-destined building by fragmenting human language into all of its current iterations. Hard to build a tower when the foreman speaks French and the workers speak Italian! Oh, well, actually that's not that hard. But you get the point.

And yet our very own United States demonstrate that enormous things can be built despite dramatic splintering. Ours is a nation created in large part on the idea of religious freedom, and, boy, have we taken that idea and run with it.

According to the 2020 U.S. Religion Census, there are at least 372 distinct religious groups in the United States, with more than 160 million people worshipping in more than 356,000 different congregations. That doesn't even count the substantial number of Americans who adhere to no religion at all.

This data came to my attention this week thanks to a post from Ryan Burge, whose site Graphs About Religion does what it says on the tin. Burge often produces interesting, thought-provoking assessments of American religion, and his maps of the prevalence of different religious traditions are no exception.

I, however, am me, and therefore wanted to play with the data myself. Burge's maps are interesting, but some do fall into the actually-a-map-of-population-density problem. Was there a way to approach it differently?

Reader, there was.

For example, I took the county-level data on religious adherents relative to population and considered how each county compared to the national average. Counties with relatively more adherents-per-resident than the national figure were colored pink. Those with relatively fewer were colored yellow.

The result is below.

This passes the smell test. Relatively less religiosity in the Northeast and on the West Coast; a lot in the Midwest, Plains and Southeast.

I applied this same approach to a number of the 30 largest religious groups counted in the Religion Census, making a smaller version of Burge's maps but using my relative scaling. Below, the level of membership in the indicated religion is compared to the average membership nationally.

What stands out pretty effectively on those maps is the regional differentiation. Religious traditions in the U.S. are often linked to geography, a function in part of the overlap of religion and community.

To emphasize this point, I took four of the above religions and overlapped them directly, showing where any one was more common than the others. The result is a complicated but I think appealing visualization of American religion.

It's remarkable that Americans can diverge so widely in their assessments of the existence and manifestation of a higher power, yet come together in one secular tradition. Imperfectly, sure, but still. It's heartening, in a moment where heartening things are not exactly pouring from the heavens like bricks from a collapsing, abandoned tower.

Chapter 2, Part 1
Returning to Ohio State

I spent much of the week traveling, including a visit to (The) Ohio State University, my alma mater. It was there that I long ago learned how to code and gained my existing appreciation for math — an appreciation influenced in part by the sculpture "Garden of Constants" near what used to be the student union.

This is data visualization in a very pure sense: actual numbers, presented in space and aesthetically in ways that reflect their significance. You can explore the image (and the link with information about the sculpture) to suss out the details. But notice, for example, that the 6 is golden colored — a reflection of its status as the smallest perfect number.

At the new student union, there's a sculpture showing each of Ohio's 88 counties, represented by sections of 88 license plates cut to match the county's shape.