Religious Geography of South Dakota

Here's a fascinating story in the Rapid City Journal:

Sense of community, relevance fuels growth of evangelical churches

By Mary Garrigan, Journal Staff Writer

When the Rev. Jim Olson first studied the religious geography of South Dakota almost 20 years ago, evangelical Protestants were still such a small part of the picture that they hardly registered on his statewide denominational map.

“Evangelical Christianity was a tiny percentage in South Dakota, so small I basically ignored it,” recalled Olson, a Lutheran minister who wrote “The Religious Geography of South Dakota” as part of his graduate studies in theology at the University of Chicago in the late 1980s.

Fast forward to 2006, and it would be hard for Olson or anyone else to ignore the hundreds of enthusiastic Christians at Countryside Community Church who gathered for worship on a recent Sunday at the athletic center at Black Hills State University — the only facility in Spearfish large enough to hold this growing evangelical church.

The majority of South Dakotans still call themselves mainline Protestants or Roman Catholics, according to the American Religion Data Archive. More than 50 percent of the state’s population describe themselves as affiliated with those two religious groups.

But in a state long dominated by mainline Protestant denominations — Lutheran, Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational — the fastest-growing segments of the religious marketplace are evangelical and nondenominational Christian churches, according to self-reported statistics from the 2000 Religious Congregations and Membership Study done by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies and collected by ARDA.