AHC/WI: Majority Non-Protestant American State

Delta Force

Banned
With a PoD after the Revolutionary War, what would be the most likely candidate for an American state that is majority non-Protestant? It can be Catholic, Orthodox, Shinto, Buddhist, non-religious, etc.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
If LDS counts as non-Protestant, then OTL Utah does - it's majority Mormon.



Arizona is:


So that means that the plurality is Catholic and Protestants make up ~42%. Note that Catholic + Non Religious + Judaism is about 49%.




But if you mean a single religion, and Mormonism doesn't count, then get Puerto Rico in since that's majority Catholic.
 
With a PoD after the Revolutionary War, what would be the most likely candidate for an American state that is majority non-Protestant? It can be Catholic, Orthodox, Shinto, Buddhist, non-religious, etc.

I'm thinking of a southwestern state like New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Or California. The Mexican American Catholics almost already outnumber the Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Don't know what exactly, but a single butterfly could push that into a majority.
 

Delta Force

Banned
If LDS counts as non-Protestant, then OTL Utah does - it's majority Mormon.

Evangelical is Protestant for purposes of this. Mormonism is unique, but close to Protestantism.

But if you mean a single religion, and Mormonism doesn't count, then get Puerto Rico in since that's majority Catholic.

It can be combinations.
 

TFSmith121

Banned
Maryland, given that it was founded as a refuge for Catholics

With a PoD after the Revolutionary War, what would be the most likely candidate for an American state that is majority non-Protestant? It can be Catholic, Orthodox, Shinto, Buddhist, non-religious, etc.

Maryland, given that it was founded as a refuge for Catholics, and political and religious toleration was, generally, pretty much a given, could have been...

Best,
 
Maryland was majority catholic for about ten years in the 1600's, it was never going to last as a catholic colony, if nothing else Cromwell would disassemble it.
 
By when? Anytime before 1900? Rhode island may already have had a Catholic majority by 1900 (or at the very least Catholics plus Jews plus others may have outnumbered Protestants). "At the turn of the century, when...Rhode Island was fast becoming the first state with a Catholic majority" https://books.google.com/books?id=J6VleZCF9gkC&pg=PP17

"Similarly, the number of Catholics was high: by the turn of the century, Rhode Island was the first state with a Roman Catholic majority." https://books.google.com/books?id=pswPyBIZdUEC&pg=PA40
 
By when? Anytime before 1900? Rhode island may already have had a Catholic majority by 1900 (or at the very least Catholics plus Jews plus others may have outnumbered Protestants). "At the turn of the century, when...Rhode Island was fast becoming the first state with a Catholic majority" https://books.google.com/books?id=J6VleZCF9gkC&pg=PP17

"Similarly, the number of Catholics was high: by the turn of the century, Rhode Island was the first state with a Roman Catholic majority." https://books.google.com/books?id=pswPyBIZdUEC&pg=PA40

This is probably the best direction. In the modern day, several Northeast states are very nearly Catholic majorities. Massachusetts tops the charts about 44% (per the census), with 43% in Rhode Island, 39% in New Jersey, and a few others going down from there.

I strongly suspect that some of these might have actually been majority Catholic in the past, before Catholic immigrants started having smaller families following greater assimilation. It should be too hard to nudge demographics a little bit and end up with enough Irish in Boston to make Massachusetts majority Catholic, I think.
 
The role of the Church in Mormonism is incompatible with baseline Protestantism.

Seconded. Mormonism has elements of cultural Protestantism, but tends to make significant major deviations in areas of theology, christology, ecclesiology, and soteriology. Early Mormonism was particularly critical of Protestantism, as evidenced in passages of The Book of Mormon.
 
If people who identify as nonreligious but are of Protestant background (e.g. Richard Dawkins, as opposed to, say, nonreligious Jews) count as non-Protestant, then the US did not have a Protestant majority in 2008. It was 50.9% non-Catholic Christian, and 1.4% Mormon - and that's without getting into Eastern Orthodox denominations, which aren't big in the US but do exist.

So in a sense, the average US state already does not have a Protestant majority. I presume that states with a lot of historic Catholic and Jewish immigration and a lot of present-day nonwhite immigration are well below 50% Protestant; previous commenters mentioned New England, and I'll add New York, Florida, California, and Hawaii to the mix.

If you're looking for a specific POD to make the Protestant percentage even lower, figure out a way to eliminate the post-WW1 immigration restrictions. At the time, immigration to the US was largely from Southern and Eastern Europe, and had few Protestants - that's why the US passed the restrictions in the first place.
 
Cher...

Early Louisiana was, before - mostly after statehood - the Northern parishes filled up with incoming Prots. (Cousin Ronnie Gaudet guarondamntees it.)

And even discounting any lingering effect from the former Mexican laws on immigrants and impresarios, the settlement patterns and demographics of Texas at the time she acceded to the US almost certainly meant that the population - in which Native Americans, Hispanics of pre-Revolutionary settlement, and others outnumbered the Texians - was majority Non-Prot and quite possibly plurality RC.
 
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