Abstract
Religious organizations play an important role in improving the standard of living for communities. In this study, we examine addresses of more than 63,000 U.S. religious organizations using publicly available non-profit 2019 data filed with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, and associated socioeconomic data from the 2014-2018 American Community Survey. Using spatial statistics methods at the county level, we find that religious organizations physically locate away (in a non-random fashion) from those of the same and different religions. Additionally, the level of spatial clustering correlates with various socioeconomic and demographic variables, reflecting economic opportunity, social needs, human development, and societal values. Higher levels of clustering are positively associated with lower incomes, higher economic inequality and higher unemployment.
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Notes
In Appendix Table 6, we report results including average organization age for each religion type. Due to missing data, sample sizes are small. Additionally, the organization age variable for each individual religion is insignificant except for Buddhist and Hindu organizations. Several other variables are also insignificant. However, all the variables that are significant have effects on organizational clustering that are consistent with our results that do not include average age.
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Cheng, E., Meng, S. The Spatial Distribution of Religious Organizations in the United States and their Socioeconomic Characteristics. Appl. Spatial Analysis 16, 789–812 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12061-022-09491-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12061-022-09491-x