Religious composition by state

In a recent thread, someone (Dan, I think) mentioned that "Oregon is almost 80% christian." I decided I was curious about that, and wanted to see what stats are out there for such numbers. Here is what I found:

From the U.S. Census Bureau. Look at pages 55 and 56 (.pdf):
http://www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/04statab/pop.pdf

There it states that for the year 2000, Oregon had a population of 1,029,000 Christian Adherents (30.1% of the total pop.)

My gosh, what a bunch of information at that census.gov website!

Now, comparing those numbers to the stats at this site, we see something a bit different (and closer to Dan's comment). This is quite likely due to the difference in how the data was collected, questions asked, etc.

http://www.adherents.com/loc/loc_oregon.html

It states:
Oregon and Washington are notable for being the U.S. states with the highest proportion of religiously-unaffiliated and self-identified "nonreligious" residents. Only 1.2% of Oregonians describe themselves as agnostics (and a statistically negligable number are atheists). But about 17% of Oregonians classify themselves as "nonreligious" (while the U.S. average is only 7%
In most of the country, Judaism is the second-largest religion (not counting the "nonreligious" segment). But it is likely that there are actually now more Buddhists (about 0.5%) than Jews in Oregon, a very unusual situation. Except for Hawaii, Oregon may be the only U.S. state in which Buddhism is the second-largest organized religion after Christianity.
An unusually high percentage of Oregonians describe themselves as Christians, but without denominational affiliation.
Oregon is known to practice a remarkably high level of religious tolerance. There is an active but small Neo-Pagan/Wiccan community, which accounts for an estimated 1/10 of one percent of the population (0.1%). Oregon ranks fifth among U.S. states in the percentage of its population which attends megachurches (1992 est.).
Summary: With regards to self-identification (regardless of official church membership), Christianity is the stated religious preference of about 75 to 79% of Oregonians. About 17% call themselves "nonreligious", 1.2% agnostic, and less than 1% each for Buddhists, Jews, Unitarian-Universalists, and Muslims. The largest and most influential specific churches are the Catholics and Latter-day Saints.

Now I find all that pretty dang interesting. Both of those sites, of course, list similar data for all states. The home page for the second link above: http://www.adherents.com/ has quite a large amount of data on just about everything you wanted to know about adherent statistics and religious geography citations (but didn't care enough to ask ).

Anyway, just wanted to share my curiosity findings.

Take care all,
--Marcia/Oregon


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