By David Bodenhamer, Etan Diamond, Kevin Mickey
Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative
University of California, Berkeley
Introduction (Draft)
Since the colonial period, religion has been an essential element
of American history and culture. By the nineteenth century, so too
was the enumeration of religious adherents, although invariably
the emphasis was on counts of Christian believers. The twentieth
century witnessed the most systematic efforts to measure denominational
strength, first by the U.S. Census of Religious Bodies (1906, 1916,
1926, and 1936) and later in the decennial census conducted since
1952 by the Glenmary Research Center. Both sources list denominational
membership for each county and state of the United States and a
host of data on church budgets, facilities, baptisms and confirmations,
income, and the like. The data are comprehensive but not complete,
focusing initially on mainstream religious adherence (e.g., Christian
denominations) in the U.S. Census counts and on self-reported data
from a much wider pool in the Glenmary censuses. While they must
be used with caution, the various censuses are reliable for analyses
of mainstream Protestant denominations; even with their limitations
they remain a primary and unparalleled resource for the study of
the 20th-century America religious experience.
The North American Religion Atlas (NARA), a new scholarly resource
developed by The Polis Center at Indiana University Purdue University
Indianapolis as a part of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative,
compiles the census data and a wealth of other scholarly resources
within a geospatial interface that enables researchers to create
their own maps - even their own atlases - of America's religious
history. The use of GIS permits scholars to extend the spatial analysis
of traditionally published atlases, resulting in more dynamic inquiries
and potentially new perspectives on a hallmark element of American
culture.
This ECAI ePublication includes two components: an interactive
map illustrating spatial changes in adherence to Protestant
denominations between 1970 and 1990, and a website
with an essay that uses data from the North American Religion Atlas
(NARA) to inform a preliminary geographical analysis of American
mainline Protestantism from 1970 to 1990. The essay is both a contribution
to American religious studies and a demonstration of the value of
longitudinal spatial analysis for scholarship in the humanities
and social sciences.
Suggested citation:
David Bodenhamer, Etan Diamond and Kevin Mickey, "Mapping the
Mainline: Using Historical GIS to Study American Religion"
(May, 2002).
An ECAI ePublication. http://escholarship.cdlib.org/ecai/
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