Ever wonder why our country has a Bible belt? The following excerpt from chapter 4 of David Olson’s The American Church in Crisis offers a quick geography lesson in church history.

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A condensed geographic history of the American church can be told in the six short paragraphs that follow.  The early churches along the East Coast were predominantly Anglican (Episcopalian) or Congregationalist.  So in 1775, when a church sexton name Robert Newman climbed to the steeple of the Old North Church in Boston, with Paul Revere’s instructions in mind, he was hanging two lanterns—“One if by land, two if by sea”—from the top of an Anglican church, built in 1723.   Boston’s Old South Church was founded in 1669 and was Congregational.

As the pioneers began to move west, they encountered a daunting obstacle called the Appalachian Mountains.  Most eastern Anglicans and Congregationalists were not built for the “rough and ready” life of the frontier.  The newly emerging Methodists and Baptists, on the other hand, moved in with a vengeance.  They filled the central and southern sections of middle America with churches on virtually every mile of country road.

Methodist churches were often founded by traveling preachers known as circuit riders.  In 1771, when a young English Methodist preacher named Francis Asbury arrived in New York City, less than 2.5% of the population in American Colonies was Methodist.  Soon afterward, Asbury mounted his horse and began traveling from town to town, preaching.  By the time he retired, forty-five years later, he had travel “an estimated 300,000 miles, delivering some 16,500 sermons,” according to Christian History and Biography.  As the leader of American Methodists, he organized the efforts of other circuit riders as well.  Sociologist Roger Finke points out that by 1850, Methodists made up more than 34% of the U.S. population.

Lutherans, who originally settled in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, later began to fill the Upper Midwest.  Those northern European immigrants seemed to love cold and desolate landscapes.  They inspired a young writer name Garrison Keillor in the 1970s to create a fictional town called Lake Wobegon, where “all women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average."

Roman Catholics immigrated in a very different pattern, settling in the large industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest.  A third wave of migration occurred between World Wars I and II when millions of African American came to those same cities in search of jobs.

The Rocky Mountains proved to be a more difficult barrier to the church than were the Appalachians.  No group did well at scaling the vast heights of the Rockies.  Thus, the West historically is rather unchurched.  The mainline presence in the West is very low.  The Catholic percentage would be low as well if not for Hispanic immigration.  Most church attendance in the West tends to be from “homegrown” American evangelicalism rather than from immigrant European Christianity.

These idiosyncrasies of history and geography cause Christianity to be expressed very differently in the four major regions of the country.  In the two least churched regions, the Northeast and the West, about 14% of people attend church each week.  In the two most churched regions, the Midwest and the South, the attendance percentage increases to 20%.

From The American Church in Crisis: Groundbreaking Research Based on a National Database of over 200,000 Churches, by David T. Olson (Zondervan, 2008); used with permission