State-level Institutional Religiosity and Funder Groups
As part of our analysis, our team examined whether contextual factors associated with a funder group’s geographic location are associated with the religious-secular composition of that funder group. Using Dr. Fulton’s data on all U.S. foundations, we calculate the percentage of foundations in a state that are religious, and use this as a measure of institutional religiosity. A mix of quantitative and qualitative analysis reveal a positive association between state institutional religiosity and funder group composition.
We used our calculated measure of institutional religiosity to create a predicted measure of institutional religiosity that is a linear combination of additional state-level contextual factors, including the average income per capita, average individual levels of religiosity, population, political party leaning, and urban population. Our results show that this predicted measure of institutional religiosity has a weak-to-moderate association with the average religious-secular composition of funder groups in each state with one or more funder groups.
Our analysis showed that states with higher predicted institutional religiosity appear to have funder groups with higher shares of faith-based members than states with low predicted institutional religiosity. Click the button to read the full report, or explore the interactive map below.
States in the map below are colored according to their predicted institutional religiosity, and funder groups (shown as colored circles) are shaded according to the percentage of their member organizations that are faith-based.