One of the joys of studying religion is how much high-quality data are available. For the latest “wow, that’s cool” source of data, check out this interactive map of religion in the United States. Put a cursor over a state and you see the religious distribution of its population. Want to see trends by region? Just move your cursor slowly across groups of states and watch how the bars change.

Thanks David Mimms and Kyndria Brown for the link.

Okay, this maybe the coolest map I’ve seen of the spread of Christianity worldwide.  From the Pew Center, it compares the distribution of Christianity today versus a century ago, and it does with a spatial-weighted map.  While the percentage of the world’s population that is Christian has dropped a bit (35% to 32%), the big change is in where Christians live.  In the map, the larger the country, the more Christians live in it.  Look what’s happened to Africa and Asia-Pacific.  This sea-change in the nature of Christianity has many, many implications that we have and will experience for some time to come.

Here’s one of my favorite maps.  It shows the percentage of Christianity and Islam in each country throughout the world.  Looking at it all surprises me just wide the reach is of these two religions that trace their roots back to the same person, i.e., Abraham.

People often talk about how religious a country the United States is, and compared to many European countries this is the case.  The map below, based on Gallup data collected from 2006-2008, however, shows that there’s considerable variation in religiosity worldwide.  There are interesting patterns by wealth, type of religion, and continent.

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