What are the most German Catholic places in the US?
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  What are the most German Catholic places in the US?
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Author Topic: What are the most German Catholic places in the US?  (Read 2082 times)
King of Kensington
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« on: March 21, 2023, 04:31:42 PM »

Obviously it'll include a bunch of midwestern rural counties.  Also are there cities where the German population was more Catholic?  Anecdotally I've heard Cincinnati Germans were more Catholic (more
mid-19th century Bavarian wave) than in Milwaukee (more late 19th century Prussian-dominated wave) but no data for this.

In Pennsylvania, the German ancestry population is going to be less Catholic because they're more likely to be of colonial era lineage than in the Midwest.
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maclennanc2
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« Reply #1 on: March 21, 2023, 05:26:37 PM »

Ste Genevieve County, Missouri and adjacent parts of Illinois
Dubuque County, Iowa
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President Punxsutawney Phil
TimTurner
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« Reply #2 on: March 21, 2023, 06:10:20 PM »

Would any places in rural Ohio qualify?
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lfromnj
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« Reply #3 on: March 21, 2023, 06:21:21 PM »

Mercer County ohio
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RINO Tom
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« Reply #4 on: March 21, 2023, 06:25:49 PM »

I have long wanted to try to try to estimate a map of German plurality counties in the US and divide them by religion (i.e., only color in counties that have plurality German ancestry and divide them between Lutheran and Catholic).  My two anecdotal additions:

(1) I would add the Metro East region of Illinois (i.e., St. Louis suburbs) as an example of a German Catholic place.  IIRC, St. Clair and Madison Counties (the two largest) are both very Catholic, very German and really not that Irish.

(2) From my experience as one myself, the large majority of people of German ancestry in both Eastern Iowa and Central Illinois (the two places I grew up) were Lutheran.
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maclennanc2
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« Reply #5 on: March 21, 2023, 06:39:33 PM »

I thought the German part of Ohio very Protestant? It's too ancestrally Republican to be Catholic.
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lfromnj
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« Reply #6 on: March 21, 2023, 06:41:16 PM »

I thought the German part of Ohio very Protestant? It's too ancestrally Republican to be Catholic.

No pretty sure its ancestrally Democrat. Even McGovern nearly got 40% here. It voted for fdr twice but very strongly against in 40 and 44 only to return to Truman. 
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King of Kensington
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« Reply #7 on: March 21, 2023, 07:24:42 PM »

Catholic

North Dakota  26%
Wisconsin  25%
Minnesota  22%
South Dakota  22%
Iowa  18%

A majority of Catholics in these states are (probably) of German ancestry.
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Brittain33
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« Reply #8 on: March 21, 2023, 07:42:46 PM »

St. Marys, Pa.
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King of Kensington
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« Reply #9 on: March 21, 2023, 08:29:21 PM »

I would add the Metro East region of Illinois (i.e., St. Louis suburbs) as an example of a German Catholic place.  IIRC, St. Clair and Madison Counties (the two largest) are both very Catholic, very German and really not that Irish.

The St. Louis MSA is 25% Catholic according to the Pew religious landscape study.
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Biden his time
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« Reply #10 on: March 21, 2023, 09:56:16 PM »

Dubois County in Southern Indiana

It stands out among its neighbors for not only its high Catholic population but also its high German population


Image Link - Catholic population


Image Link - German population
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King of Kensington
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« Reply #11 on: March 21, 2023, 10:45:20 PM »
« Edited: March 21, 2023, 10:58:06 PM by King of Kensington »


There you go.

Just looked and it was JFK's second best county in Indiana (61.5%), coming in just behind Lake County (Gary area which had a lot of blacks and ethnic Slavs).  
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« Reply #12 on: March 22, 2023, 12:26:32 AM »

https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=180258.0
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Bismarck
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« Reply #13 on: March 22, 2023, 06:38:44 AM »


There you go.

Just looked and it was JFK's second best county in Indiana (61.5%), coming in just behind Lake County (Gary area which had a lot of blacks and ethnic Slavs).  

Yes I was going to say Dubious County. There’s a pretty good German restaurant there and the town of Jasper is full of old beautiful Catholic Churches. It’s also where senator Mike Braun, a catholic of german descent, is from.
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Gass3268
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« Reply #14 on: March 22, 2023, 09:55:17 AM »

Northeast Wisconsin
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Torie
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« Reply #15 on: March 22, 2023, 09:58:29 AM »

Garrison Keillor assured me it was Stearns County, MN.
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RINO Tom
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« Reply #16 on: March 22, 2023, 12:26:59 PM »

Catholic

North Dakota  26%
Wisconsin  25%
Minnesota  22%
South Dakota  22%
Iowa  18%

A majority of Catholics in these states are (probably) of German ancestry.

It's kind of interesting looking at those states' ancestries, though.  This is super simplified and only for directional information, so I picked out relevant ancestry groups for Catholic/Lutheran and ignored groups like English, "American," Scottish, etc.  These groups all have irreligious populations, but if you assume that the Irish, Polish, French and Italian populations are all Catholic for simplicity's sake and you assume that the Scandinavian populations are all Lutheran in a similar manner and then assume 20% of each are "irreligious" to reduce the denominator, you could theoretically come up with "missing Catholic" and "missing Lutheran" (from the Pew totals) populations to try to gauge the Germans.

ANCESTRY
North Dakota: 41.4% German, 32.5% Scandinavian, 7.7% Irish, 5.2% French, 2.4% Polish, 1.2% Italian
Wisconsin: 40.5% German, 11.2% Scandinavian, 10.8% Irish, 8.8% Polish, 4.2% French, 3.5% Italian
Minnesota: 33.8% German, 26.1% Scandinavian, 10.5% Irish, 4.6% Polish, 4.4% French, 2.3% Italian
South Dakota: 38.8% German, 19.6% Scandinavian, 10.7% Irish, 2.8% French, 1.7% Polish, 1.3% Italian
Iowa: 35.1% German, 13.5% Irish, 9.5% Scandinavian, 2.1% French, 2.1% Italian, 1.3% Polish

PEW NUMBERS
North Dakota: 32.5% Lutheran, 26.0% Catholic
Wisconsin: 25.0% Catholic, 19.0% Lutheran
Minnesota: 26.0% Lutheran, 22.0% Catholic
South Dakota: 22.0% Catholic, 18.0% Lutheran
Iowa: 18.0% Catholic, 14.0% Lutheran

"MISSING" POPULATIONS (Using simplified assumptions stated above)
North Dakota: 12.8% missing Catholics, 1.0% missing Lutherans
Wisconsin: 10.0% missing Lutherans, 3.2% missing Catholics
Minnesota: 5.1% missing Lutherans, 4.6% missing Catholics
South Dakota: 8.8% missing Catholics, 2.3% missing Lutherans
Iowa: 6.4% missing Lutherans, 2.8% missing Catholics

Again, this is a totally $hlt "model," haha ... but since those assumptions did not include any Germans, you could theoretically/broadly conclude that the states with more "missing Catholics" have a larger German Catholic population and the ones with more "missing Lutherans" have a larger German Lutheran population?  This of course ignores that (IIRC) a disproportionate share of "Nones" were former Mainline Protestants, so if we are looking at this from a heritage-based perspective (which is more relevant than how often you attend church in this arena, if you ask me), the Lutheran German population is likely underrepresented here.

I'm quite surprised there hasn't been a better analysis of this using demographics, though.  Maybe there has.  We could of course get like 99% of the way there if we could get our hands on data that at least estimates a state's German immigration by state.  A Prussian German has a very high chance of being Lutheran, a Bavarian a very high chance of being Catholic, etc.

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King of Kensington
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« Reply #17 on: March 22, 2023, 02:25:57 PM »

Don't know how much difference it makes, but you can look up first ancestry to avoid the overlap.  Furthermore one's religious identity is likely tied to primary identity (for instance a Norwegian-Irish Lutheran is probably more likely to put Norwegian first while someone with that same ancestry mix who is Catholic is likely to put Irish first).
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King of Kensington
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« Reply #18 on: March 22, 2023, 03:45:08 PM »
« Edited: March 22, 2023, 04:07:46 PM by King of Kensington »

I just did Wisconsin as an example.

Wisconsin

German  31.9%

Scandinavian  7.2%

Irish  5.4%
Polish  5.4%
French/French Canadian  2.1%
Italian  2.4%

NHW Catholics are 22% of the state.  About 15% are from the "other white Catholic" groups. That leaves 7% for German Catholic.

And 12% of the state would be "German Lutheran" if you subtract the Scandinavians out.  

North Dakota must be around 20% German Catholic given that all the other Catholic groups have small numbers.  North Dakota is also different in that it's mostly descendants of German-Russians
rather than immigrants from Germany.
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pikachu
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« Reply #19 on: March 23, 2023, 09:55:28 AM »

Not sure if it’s the most German Catholic place in the US, but German Catholics are a big part of Cincinnati’s culture and identity.
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lfromnj
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« Reply #20 on: March 23, 2023, 11:27:09 AM »

Interesting that La Salle stands out as German in the deep south.
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King of Kensington
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« Reply #21 on: March 23, 2023, 11:51:21 AM »

Quote
Most of the colonial Germans were Protestant, since British authorities discouraged Catholic immigration, and Catholics in any case found a warmer welcome from Austrian and Russian authorities seeking to acquire newly acquired regions in southeastern Europe.  Despite the common association of southern and western Germany with Catholicism, and northern and eastern Germany with Protestantism, religious divisions actually formed a complex patchwork that left significant Protestant areas within Bavaria, for example, and found Protestant Prussia after 1815 governing not only the heavily Catholic Rhineland along Germany's western border but equally Catholic Westphalia to the north and Silesia far to the east.  These accidents of religious geography meant that as many as two-fifths of antebellum German immigrants were probably of Catholic background, while Protestants from eastern and central Germany became dominant thereafter.  Early-settled Cincinnati became a center for German Catholicism, while Old Lutheran settlement in St. Louis and Milwaukee gave those cities a stronger Protestant stamp.

- Kathleen Conzen, Germans in Minnesota
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Snow Belt Republican
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« Reply #22 on: March 24, 2023, 05:31:24 AM »

My paternal grandfather's side came from a rural MN county (forgot which one, I'll have to ask) which had a lot of German Catholics (he was one)!
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walleye26
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« Reply #23 on: March 26, 2023, 10:43:45 AM »

The eastern portion of Wisconsin, from southern Brown to the WOW counties certainly will be a large portion.

Sheboygan County is very German, and Plymouth High School has the only authentic German Polka band in the nation. Calumet County, Fond du Lac, Washington, and Manitowoc are certainly highly German Catholic.

The Catholics in central Wisconsin (Stevens Point, Wausau, etc) are too Polish. Back when we got phonebooks you could open a Marathon/Portage county yellow pages and find a lot of names ending in ski, czi, zyk, or cik.
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TDAS04
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« Reply #24 on: March 26, 2023, 12:20:48 PM »

Look at areas of the rural Midwest that voted for JFK, especially those where he vastly outperformed Stevenson.  I believe there’s strong correlation.
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