The second largest religious tradition among Arizona residents is Hinduism. That’s right. In Arizona-where only four months ago, Governor Jan Brewer was pressured into vetoing a ‘ religious freedom bill” that would have allowed corporations to decline service to homosexual customers out of religious conviction-Hindus are the runner-up religious group. This is just one of many surprising findings in a state-by-state map of the second largest religious traditions made by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies. While a 2012 Gallup poll reported that 77% of Americans identify as Christian, this map helps paint a far more diverse, geographically distinct, and demographically shifting portrait of religious belief in what is all too often assumed to be a homogeneously Christian country.

In the West, Buddhism ranks in second place, while Islam is the second most reported religious tradition in some twenty states across the South and Midwest. In the Northeast, meanwhile, Judaism is the runner-up. While these numbers only represent a small fraction of the population in each state, suggesting that the US is just as religiously uniform as certain conservative politicians would like to believe, it is important to take two factors into account: immigration and the distinction between a […]