Religion and demography in the United States: A geographic analysis

Religion lends us insight into understanding and coping with life and death, but how does religion influence births and deaths in the U.S.? How might the relationship between religion and demography vary for different religious groups and geographic settings? This dissertation opens the door to research in spatial demography and religion by combining vital statistics, Census estimates, and data on religious adherence from the American Religious Data Archives (ARDA) to study county-level differences in fertility and mortality.; Data for religious adherence are summarized and used to calculate an index of religious diversity, using the Lieberson isolation index. Analysis of local, spatial correlations are used identify clusters of high and low religious adherence and diversity. These measures are then used in a multivariate regression analysis, primarily to uncover associations between religious adherence and fertility and mortality. Geographically weighted regression (GWR) analysis is then used to demonstrate the powerful effect of local variations in the coefficients for religious adherence.; GWR methods demonstrate the importance of space on demographic processes and provide a useful tool for linking the local and contextual importance of place to commonly used demographic measures and indices: general fertility rates and age-adjusted death rates. Geography plays a sophisticated role in how religion, fertility, and mortality interact In general, religion and fertility are positively related. For Protestant-Mainline adherence and fertility, the relationship is positive, but only for some counties, particularly in the Southwest and West. For Catholic adherence, there is both a positive and negative association with fertility---positive in the Southwest and negative in the Northeast. In the study of mortality, there is generally a negative association between religious adherence and mortality. For Protestant-Mainline groups, the most negative associations with age-adjusted death rates occur in the Midwest. More research is needed to understand the interplay of religious adherence and fertility and mortality at a local scale in the U.S.