Religious Diversity in the Southeastern U.S.

Religious diversity—the suite of options available to believers in a given area—is an intriguing phenomenon that is under-researched by geographers, though not by other social scientists. This paper examines the geography of religious diversity in the southeastern U.S. It offers an alternative to the neoclassical economics and social ecology perspectives by employing an approach borrowed from island biogeography to explain the spatial structure of religious diversity. Regression analyses using data from the Glenmary Research Center reveal that the relationship between denomination counts and county population size is strong and consistent over a wide range of southern states. Several interpretations of the data are provided, including an evaluation of positive and negative residuals.