I was reading through some of the recommended diaries this morning and read
the diary by
wclathe. In it, he made an interesting comment about Focus on the Family being a hate group (can't say I really disagree with him there!).
Well, it got me to wondering about a connection between hate groups and fundamentalist christians. Normally, I would have thought that hate groups would have a high correlation with African American populations. In other words, those states with the most percentage of hate groups would also have a higher percentage of the population as African Americans. While this may also be a true correlation, I did some other analysis that indicates something else as well....
Details below the fold.
I started off my research with the website
Tolerance.org. There is a wealth of information there about various hate groups across the United States. The link I provided will show you a map with the number of hate groups identified in each state.
I decided to convert these numbers to a per capita basis so it is more representative. I used US Census date for populations by State from 2004 to do this calculation. I can provide detail into how I actually did this, but the diary would get too bogged down in mathematics if I explained the methodology in detail now.
I then sorted it by State with the highest per capita hate group organizations. The top 14 states were (in order):
-South Carolina
-DC
-Mississippi
-Arkansas
-Louisiana
-Alabama
-Wyoming
-Tennessee
-Idaho
-West Virginia
-Georgia
-North Carolina
-Missouri
-Virginia
Then I went on a hunt for data that described religion by State. That, unfortunately, was a little harder to come by. What I did find though was a cool little map and description of the Bible Belt from Wikipedia. I then took this map and wrote in the percentages related to hate groups for the top 14 States above. This edited map looks like this:
The red part of the map indicates the Bible Belt area according to the Wikipedia map. The numbers you see on the States relate to my research. Well, no surprise probably, that the areas of the country with the most hate groups happen to be in the Bible Belt.
I'm sure much more thorough analysis should be done here to prove my hypothesis, but that should be left for those with more time and resources than I have. But I thought you all might find it interesting. And, please, if you have thoughts or comments, let 'em fly!
