How Many Megachurches Are There? Where Are They Located?
...and more talk about non-denoms. They are everywhere.
You know what’s absolutely crazy? In the 200+ posts I have put together for this newsletter, I have never once written about megachurches. I just can’t believe that it’s never crossed my mind until now, but that’s about to change.
I am going to lean heavily on the work of the great team at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research - they are the real clearing house for this kind of data and collecting and organizing it is yeoman’s work. They house all their information about megachurches at this website - where they define a megachurch as, “2000 or more persons in attendance at weekly worship, counting adults and children at all locations.” So you can quibble with them all you want. It’s a completely arbitrary number but I think that we can all agree - two thousand people is a whole lot of folks gathering on a weekend.
They currently estimate there are about 1800 megachurches in the United States. Just to give a sense of scale for this, there are approximately 360,000 houses of worship in the United States - so a very large church is certainly not the norm in this part of the world.
I just asked ChatGPT to write me a simple scraping program to cull all the information that they list in their database. They really only have four pieces of information per church - name, location, size, and denomination. But that’s more than enough to write a whole bunch of articles on the topic, so let’s get down to work.
They currently list 1666 churches in that database but that also includes a handful from Canada. I am going to remove those for this analysis. Let’s start by visualizing all these churches on a map. I tried to group them into a handful of denominations. The size of the circles indicates a larger weekly attendance.
As you can see, there’s a whole lot of megachurches east of the Mississippi River. It should come as no surprise that a bunch of dots appear all over the Bible belt, particularly in places around Atlanta, Georgia and Nashville, Tennessee. But there are also tight clusters in the Charlotte area, too. Also, Florida has a whole bunch of megachurches - a point that I will return to a bit later on. Yet there are some really big churches in the northeast corridor, too. All the way from Washington DC up through Boston.
But I did want to point out the left side of the map, as well. There’s this really interesting line of megachurches that runs right up the Pacific coast. It stretches all the way down into San Diego, extends nearly the entire span of California and then picks up again in Oregon and Washington - specifically in the areas of Portland and Seattle.
I know what you all want right now - an interactive map where you can click and pan and zoom. Well, guess what - I’ve got you hooked up.