Alternate Largest Religious Groups in the US

How could these religious groups instead of Roman Catholicism in OTL be the largest religious group in the United States or TTL's equivalent?

Eastern Orthodox Christianity
Baptism
Methodism
Anglicanism
Presbyterianism
Reform Churches
Gnosticism
Islam
Hinduism
Buddhism
Confucianism/Taoism/Chinese religions
Catholic majority
 
Baptists and Methodists were the largest religious groups before the Catholic dominated waves of immigration began in the 1840s. If you prevent the immigration, you keep them on top. IF we increase the immigration from Catholic Europe and Latin America we can get a Catholic majority, maybe.
The rest of the list is very ASB.
 
If you had much higher immigration from the Middle East and Ottoman areas, it is possible to get a Muslim plurality in the United States- someone did a timeline on it a few months back.
 
A Puritan-wank where Cromwell and company leave England rather than face Charles I (or lose the Civil War or something) could put the Puritan's brand of Calvinism (which later splintered into Congregationalism, Unitarianism, and a few others) in the lead.

Eastern Orthodox though? A POD where ALL the various slavic peoples embrace Eastern Orthodoxy (and in that case the Germans might conquer and Catholicize more of *Poland) could get you some of the way there. But consider how many sources you have for Catholic immigrants- Ireland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Quebecois, some Germans, Poland, in the modern day Latin America. From the Potato Famine on most of the immigrants coming into the country were Catholics- thats over a century of immigration. You don't have similar numbers of OTL Eastern Orthodox countries that can provide that kind of stream of immigrants.
 
A lot depends on your definition of a religious group. If the term protestant was applied as a group rather than Anglican, Baptist, Methodist etc then Protestants would be the largest religious group and given that there has only been one Catholic president and four unitarians which itself is a loose definition i.e was Jefferson and atheist?, it suggests that the protestant groupings yield the influence. Your list doesn't mention the Mormons by the way.
 
You also have the issue of semantics when it comes to grouping religions by classification. From a Catholic view point, the Baptists are Protestant. Many Baptists (and there are dozens of separate sects; the Southern Baptist happens to be the largest) are offended if you call them Protestant. They feel that term belongs to the Anglican and Lutheran churches, both still "too Catholic" for their tastes.
 
Catholic - French won the French and Indian war. No Wesley Reformation.
Anglican - The British wins the American Revolution.
Buddhist - Xiang discovers America first.
Methodism - French wins French and Indian war. Wesley Reformation.
Baptist - The north were slave states as well, slaves used the Bible to become literate.
Agnostic - A greater more convincing argument from science in the 1960's that causes churches to re-evaluate doctrine.
Neognostic - some crackpot author becomes famous for starting a religious revolution that brings back gnosticism.
Islam - America is founded by an Islamic country. Possibly as a desperate escape if the catholics were successful in the crusades.

Lutherism is also very plausible, a greater german immigration, germany does not get involved in WWI. a lot of war refugees go to neutral america, having their houses hit with some sort of collateral damage.
 
Embrace the words of Buddha!!!

A Buddhist US would be an interresting TL.

You mean like a Chinese colonization via Pacific to Atlantic coast? I suppose that wouldn't really be 'the' United States then. As for the other denominations ... you might have an early major American figure's religion or church come into the public eye ... turning a large number of Americans to 'change' their own denominations to match. The waves of Italian and other Catholic peoples still needs to be altered through as well.
 
Actually...

It wd hardly take a British victory in the American Revolution to create a larger Anglican (nominal, at least) population. Simply ensure that Cousin Tom's ideas about the Va Statute for Religious Freedom - i.e., disestablishment - sputter out throughout the South, perhaps because of a perceived challenge to States' Rights on the part of those supporting disestablishment at the federal level (NE's Congregationalists and Southern Whiskypalians maintained establishment in their states for some time after the revolution OTL, after all). Wrap Southern identity in the vestments of Anglicanism, and you get a vast number of nominally Anglican Southerners.
 
Catholic majority seems like the likeliest alternative.

Islam is also a good possibility, and there was a timeline on it.

Could there have been a more massive immigration from both China and Japan though?

Ideas on alternative immigrations are interesting.
 
Top