Earlier, I blogged about some maps of the number of religious houses of worship by state - 702 Mandirs, 89 Jain temples, 236 Sikh gurdwaras, 2039 Buddhist temples, and 1855 Islamic masjids / mosques. In response readers asked for maps of the numbers of religious adherents as a percentage of the population. I thought this would be tough, so I told the monkeys in the basement of our bunker that they wouldn’t eat until they brought me such information. I was worried that I would have a bunch of starving monkeys on our hands, but lo and behold - they came through. Below the fold is a map of Muslims as a percentage of residents by county across the entire USAA map of Muslims as a percentage of residents by county across the entire USA. Click on it if you want a larger version.

There are only a handful of counties with between 2 and 10% muslims - Queens (obviously), but also one in Michigan, one in Ohio, one in Delaware, one in Virginia and a few in Georgia. Not at all where I expected them to be. None of them are in California at all, but both CA and upstate NY have a number of counties with between .8 - 2.1% muslim populations, as do Michigan, Jersey, Texas, and several other states. Heck, even Wyoming and Colorado meet that threshold in a few places!

Unfortunately, no such maps are readily available for Hindus, Jains, Sikhs or Buddhists, probably because they’re too small a section of the population, and too dispersed, to readily show up.

UPDATE:

There are many other such maps, all of which concern “mainstream” Abrahamic faiths. Here’s some background about them:

The U.S. Census Bureau, due to issues related to the separation of church and state, does not ask questions related to faith or religion on the decennial census. Accordingly, there are few sources of comprehensive data on church membership and religious affiliation for the United States. Perhaps the leading organization to address this gap is the Glenmary Research Center, which publishes Religious Congregations and Membership in the United States, 2000. The following series of county-level choropleth maps, which reveals the distribution of the larger and more regionally concentrated church bodies, draws on this resource

(Via Marginal Revolution)