EncuentraIglesias releases one of the largest open maps of U.S. churches: 212,259 mapped across all 50 states

A free, interactive tool lets anyone explore the geography of American faith, cross-referenced with Pew Research's 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study.

UNITED STATES — EncuentraIglesias.com has published The Map of Faith in the USA, a free, interactive tool that georeferences 212,259 churches across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The map lets anyone — believers, researchers and journalists — explore where churches are located, which denomination they belong to, and how religious practice is distributed across the country.

A story of a Protestant landscape

According to the Pew Research Center's 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study, 62% of U.S. adults identify as Christian (40% Protestant, 19% Catholic), while roughly 29% are religiously unaffiliated. After falling from 78% in 2007, Christian identity appears to have leveled off since about 2019.

The church map reveals the physical side of that picture. Catholics make up 19% of Americans, yet Catholic parishes account for just 5.6% of the church buildings on the map — because Catholic parishes are fewer and larger. Protestant and non-denominational congregations, by contrast, are many, smaller and spread across the country, dominating the physical landscape of American faith.

"Surveys measure what Americans believe; a map shows where they gather. We wanted to build an open tool anyone can use and cite — not to replace the demographic work of Pew Research, but to give the geography of American faith an address, a street and a map."

— María del Carmen Salazar, Managing Editor, EncuentraIglesias

Where the churches are

Georgia leads with 12,873 mapped churches, followed by California (12,251), North Carolina (12,150), Alabama (11,637) and Ohio (10,438) — a concentration consistent with the "Bible Belt" of the American South.

Methodology

Religious-identity figures come from the Pew Research Center (2023-24 Religious Landscape Study, 36,908 respondents). The church-location layer is an open dataset georeferenced by EncuentraIglesias from OpenStreetMap and public sources. It is not a complete census of every U.S. church — the country has more congregations than are mapped here — but one of the largest open, georeferenced samples available; the denomination percentages describe the churches in the dataset, not the full national total.

Resource for media

The map is free to cite and embed, with attribution and a link to EncuentraIglesias.com.

About EncuentraIglesias.com: a directory and digital media site about faith and religion, with information on churches across 14 countries. Its mission is to connect people with communities of faith.