Harvard University’s Pluralism Project has many interesting resources concerning minority religions in the USA. Here, for example, is their map of mandirs across America:
To some extent, this map can be read as a proxy for the distribution of Hindus across the country, although only crudely. Because the map indicates the number of temples and not the size of their congregations, a state with a large number of small temples will show up as darker brown (I love their coloring scheme) than one with a smaller number of large temples. That is, there might be more Hindus in Illinois than New York, but they simply worship at a few very large temples.
Despite this limitation, there is still much to be learned from reading these maps. I was surprised to see, for example, that there were more mandirs in Georgia than in the state of Washington, or Michigan. Who knew there were so many mandirs in the south?
The site also includes maps of the 89 Jain temples, 236 Sikh gurdwaras, 2039 Buddhist temples, and the 1855 Islamic mosques that they have catalogued.
