I think the most interesting parts of the axes graphs are the various inflection points, or sometimes their absence, giving a smoother curve-type trend. Each is well represented in the various graphs. And the inflections do not occur at the same year for the different subdivisions. They usually note some external influence. In this type I presentation, I suspect migration, more from smaller population centers to larger ones.
In a time perspective of 50 years, there are also international shifts, with Vietnamese refugees at the early parts of the time lines, Catholic Hispanics with different attendance distributions than descendants of the European Catholic immigrants in more recent years, and an influx of people with Asian religions after about 1990.
Good insights -- the history of religious and ethnic groups is reflected in those graphs. Aligned with your comment about the "absence" of inflection points, I found it notable how the "rarely" changed over time. Must be made up mostly of folks attending a wedding or funeral in a house of worship?
An interesting reads, especially as I too live in a "rural" county in northern Idaho. What is interesting here, viz. your data, is how old in average age the county where I live has become. I wonder if this is true elsewhere. As of the last census, there are now more people 65+ in age than 18 and under. Does this skew church attendance data? And most of the newcomers, by far, are "urban exiles" from California, Seattle, and Portland. So you have the urban mindset transplanted to a rural county.
A very interesting article, especially how you parse the growth of the Nones and their ubiquity. Perhaps the stage is being set for another Great Awakening!?
I really struggle with some of these graphs because I'm colorblind. The red, green, and some other color (maybe brown?) are really hard to distinguish. Could you try to use line styles or markers or something?
Claude lied to you. I can't really distinguish Black Prot., Catholic, and No Religion. Catholic is just slightly more distinct. My magazine article cited this article that discusses palettes: https://www.nature.com/articles/nmeth.1618. I extracted from it the palette that works best for me.
"That's the Wong (2011) palette in Nature — same family as Okabe-Ito (which is the palette I used in the graph above), just with RGB/CMYK values spelled out instead of hex"
My apologies. I think I know the problem. I use the Wong palette, but there are a couple of colors within it that are still difficult for me. I discard "orange" as being too close to "vermillion," and I discard "reddish purple" for being too close to "bluish green." (Yes, I realize how ridiculous that sounds to people who can see colors.) That gives me a 6-color palette.
On the rural unaffiliated youth: I feel like this is a major theme in Wendell Berry’s fiction. I wonder if it was graphed if you could see ties to the rise of the opioid epidemic. I’m thinking of his young male character that returns to the farm after dealing with drug issues in Hannah Coulter
The collapse of the Black Protestant Church in cities shocked me too.
More Democrat voting Catholics in cities explains why so many are shocked to see that the majority of white Catholics vote Republican. Where we live often changes some of these categorical labels. The mindset and culture of Americans in cities and in the country continues to drift apart.
Especially since people exaggerate their attendance. The numbers actually in church and listening to their pastor are certainly lower than what is reported.
In addition, anecdotally one of the reasons I don't endorse a candidate or talk about who people should vote for in my church is not just because I want to bring people from both parties to Christ, but because the number who would switch and vote for who I disapprove of least is almost zero. The black church may be different - and it may be more about mobilizing people to vote, but I agree with you. Unfortunately, that graph shows that the influence of the black church in cities is waning.
I think the most interesting parts of the axes graphs are the various inflection points, or sometimes their absence, giving a smoother curve-type trend. Each is well represented in the various graphs. And the inflections do not occur at the same year for the different subdivisions. They usually note some external influence. In this type I presentation, I suspect migration, more from smaller population centers to larger ones.
In a time perspective of 50 years, there are also international shifts, with Vietnamese refugees at the early parts of the time lines, Catholic Hispanics with different attendance distributions than descendants of the European Catholic immigrants in more recent years, and an influx of people with Asian religions after about 1990.
The migration inside the United States from rural to suburban is something that I thought about a lot when writing this one up.
No way to really tackle it with this data, however.
Good insights -- the history of religious and ethnic groups is reflected in those graphs. Aligned with your comment about the "absence" of inflection points, I found it notable how the "rarely" changed over time. Must be made up mostly of folks attending a wedding or funeral in a house of worship?
An interesting reads, especially as I too live in a "rural" county in northern Idaho. What is interesting here, viz. your data, is how old in average age the county where I live has become. I wonder if this is true elsewhere. As of the last census, there are now more people 65+ in age than 18 and under. Does this skew church attendance data? And most of the newcomers, by far, are "urban exiles" from California, Seattle, and Portland. So you have the urban mindset transplanted to a rural county.
A very interesting article, especially how you parse the growth of the Nones and their ubiquity. Perhaps the stage is being set for another Great Awakening!?
I really struggle with some of these graphs because I'm colorblind. The red, green, and some other color (maybe brown?) are really hard to distinguish. Could you try to use line styles or markers or something?
I'm also an academic, and I wrote about this issue a while back. It's a real issue in predominantly-male engineering. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10839151
What about this graph? Claude tells me this is the gold standard for a color blind friendly palette:
https://imgur.com/a/IVDsxJ4
Claude lied to you. I can't really distinguish Black Prot., Catholic, and No Religion. Catholic is just slightly more distinct. My magazine article cited this article that discusses palettes: https://www.nature.com/articles/nmeth.1618. I extracted from it the palette that works best for me.
I took a screenshot of that palette from the Nature article and uploaded it in my Claude session:
https://imgur.com/a/KGlKiir
"That's the Wong (2011) palette in Nature — same family as Okabe-Ito (which is the palette I used in the graph above), just with RGB/CMYK values spelled out instead of hex"
My apologies. I think I know the problem. I use the Wong palette, but there are a couple of colors within it that are still difficult for me. I discard "orange" as being too close to "vermillion," and I discard "reddish purple" for being too close to "bluish green." (Yes, I realize how ridiculous that sounds to people who can see colors.) That gives me a 6-color palette.
Colors are also tough for me. If I stare long enough, I can start to make them out.
On the rural unaffiliated youth: I feel like this is a major theme in Wendell Berry’s fiction. I wonder if it was graphed if you could see ties to the rise of the opioid epidemic. I’m thinking of his young male character that returns to the farm after dealing with drug issues in Hannah Coulter
I've always fiddled around with the idea of "deaths of despair" but anything there is going to be county based statistics.
Damn, I legitimately started pulling the data together to do a preliminary analysis on this but someone already did it (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953621009746?__cf_chl_f_tk=SlSrpIsrmhuXcA6HKb07QOoCAK1eXKZHitUHgx1d8Os-1782832083-1.0.1.1-yb0ETBgPD9_ip5aJSPEnO1oOPSKVX2g7WVOlxdGpauE). You could do more of a focus on relationship between Nones and deaths of despair but this is basically the analysis I was imagining and it found basically what I would have expected it to find
The collapse of the Black Protestant Church in cities shocked me too.
More Democrat voting Catholics in cities explains why so many are shocked to see that the majority of white Catholics vote Republican. Where we live often changes some of these categorical labels. The mindset and culture of Americans in cities and in the country continues to drift apart.
I was talking to a reporter this week about how much the Democratic party believes that a huge seat of power in their coalition is the Black Church.
I don't think that's empirically true. At least not at a macro-level.
Especially since people exaggerate their attendance. The numbers actually in church and listening to their pastor are certainly lower than what is reported.
In addition, anecdotally one of the reasons I don't endorse a candidate or talk about who people should vote for in my church is not just because I want to bring people from both parties to Christ, but because the number who would switch and vote for who I disapprove of least is almost zero. The black church may be different - and it may be more about mobilizing people to vote, but I agree with you. Unfortunately, that graph shows that the influence of the black church in cities is waning.