How Many Go to Church in Minnesota?

I'm catching up on the daily papers now that I'm back in Minnesota, and I ran across a problem with a story from the Tuesday (June 24) Star Tribune called Politics and Religion: A Closer Walk.

In it, writer Jeff Strickler tells us about the recent findings of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in their U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. Basically, Americans' beliefs and their effect on their political and community practice are more complicated than one might think, based on media coverage over the last few years. Big surprise.

The story was interesting, although a bit sketchy, so it's cool to go check out the details on the Pew Forum website as well. But the thing that got me was the graphic that accompanied the Strib article. I'll reprint it here so you can see what I mean:


The map puts Minnesota in the 41-50% weekly church attendance group, right? But if you look in the bar chart right above, it clearly says that only 38% of Minnesotans go to church at least once a week.

I have to say, this error made me doubt the whole map, and wish they had printed a darn table showing the numbers by state! Aren't you surprised that California has higher church attendance than, say, Oklahoma?

So I went and downloaded the Religious Landscapes report from the Pew Forum website and after digging around, found the page that was used as the data source (see the pdf of that page here). Well, it turns out that the Strib labeled their states incorrectly -- although the lowest- and highest-attending states are correct, the two sets in the middle, 31-40% and 41-50%, are switched.

So just as a I suspected -- people in California, New York, Florida, Oregon, and all the other states shown in green on the map are less likely to attend services than people in Indiana, North Carolina, Texas or Georgia.