My favorite table in Comparative Statistics is the one comparing the number of Presbyterians with the total population in each state. The separation-of-powers provision in the U.S. Constitution that has, among other things, kept religion out of the decennial census has also meant that we don't often see statistics on church membership across political entities. Slipped inconspicuously amidst a myriad of presbytery and synod figures, the one-page display is the only annual publication I know where numbers on Presbyterians and the larger population routinely share space. In case you missed it, here are a few highlights from 1996, along with some trends over the last decade.
We're Few--Yet Scattered
Presbyterians are spread thinly but rather evenly across the United States. While it's true that in a couple of areas our presence is rather slight, it's also true that every state has at least a handful of Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) congregations (Hawaii, with six, and Rhode Island and Vermont, each with nine, have the least), and only two states have fewer than 1,000 Presbyterians residing within their borders: Maine, with 645, and Vermont, with 733.
At the other end of the spectrum, nine states have more than 100,000 Presbyterians, led by Pennsylvania with 280,028, California with 185,479, and North Carolina with 165,019.
On a relative basis, Presbyterians comprise around 1% of the United States population. At one pole are New England, where Presbyterians make up considerably less than 0.5% of the population (in Maine, the extreme case, only one in every 2,000 people is Presbyterian), and Hawaii, where only one in every one thousand residents (0.1%) is a Presbyterian. Yet nowhere are Presbyterians more than 2.3% of the population the "concentration" in Pennsylvania. Other states with populations that are more than 2% Presbyterian are North Carolina (2.2%), South Carolina (2.1%), Iowa (2.1%), and Nebraska (2.1%).
Looking Down, Looking Up.
Between 1986 and 1996, Presbyterian congregations showed a net loss of over one-half million members. Most states participated in this downward movement, with the greatest net losses occurring in Pennsylvania (-61,531), New York (-38,090), and Ohio (-36,960). Still, five states bucked the trend, most notably South Carolina (+7,881) and Georgia (+4,875). Also registering net gains for the decade were Nevada (+521), New Hampshire (+339), and Maine (+85).
Only in these two New England states did the net gains result in a rate of growth for Presbyterians that exceeded that of the overall population. In New Hampshire, Presbyterian membership grew by 22%, compared to 17% for the state as a whole. In Maine, Presbyterian growth was 15%, almost double that for the state (8%). The other three states with growing numbers of Presbyterians made those gains in a context of higher rates of growth. South Carolina came the closest to replicating the state's overall rate of growth; the number of Presbyterians was up 11%, while the state's population grew by 12%. In Georgia, Presbyterian membership was up by 6% over the decade, but Georgia's population overall grew by almost 25%. And in booming Nevada, the 11% growth rate among Presbyterians was dwarfed by the state population's ten-year gain of 73%.
In short, Presbyterians comprise a small portion of the population in every state, and with a couple of exceptions, that share has declined over the last decade. That news hardly surprises, given the magnitude of Presbyterian loss in a decade when the country as a whole grew by more than 26 million. Yet there is an even darker lining to this dark cloud. On average, the church has done a better job of retaining and recruiting new members in those parts of the country where overall population growth has been relatively slow. As a result, Presbyterians are becoming an increasingly-smaller part of the population in many states where population growth is among the nation's highest. Presbyterians still have many geographical advantages that could facilitate reversal of long-term membership decline (e.g., more than 11,000 congregations, spread across every state), but the trend of falling even further behind in states growing the fastest can only make the task of reversal more problematic.
Email the author: Jack Marcum
Research Services