What are the most German Catholic places in the US?

[King of Kensington]

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.

[King of Kensington]

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.

[King of Kensington]

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.

[King of Kensington]

Dubois County in Southern Indiana

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).  

[King of Kensington]

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).

[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.

[King of Kensington]

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

[King of Kensington]

This article suggests that 55% of Chicago's Germans were Catholic, based on geographic origin.

http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/512.html

I find that difficult to believe though.  Chicago whites are plurality-Catholic but only by a narrow margin according to Pew (38%-33%).  The Irish, Poles and Italians would make up most of that (though obviously there's mixing and a decent number would have at least some German ancestry).  But German ancestry is the most common in the region, so presumably they're a pretty big plurality of the White Protestant population.

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/metro-area/chicago-metro-area/racial-and-ethnic-composition/white/

[King of Kensington]

Ridgewood, Queens was perhaps the last German immigrant neighborhood in the US.  It received a lot of post-war German immigrants.

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/25/nyregion/germans-came-now-they-are-us-ethnic-queens-neighborhood-melting-away-into.html

Before WWII, Germans were the largest ethnic group in Queens. 

[King of Kensington]

The NORC surveys ca. 1980 found that German Americans were 70% Protestant, 21% Catholic.

Source: Thomas Archdeacon, Becoming American (1984)

[King of Kensington]

Yup, the 1880s wave was mostly Protestant.

German immigration to the Badger State occurred in three waves. The first, from 1850 to 1860, was made up of settlers from mainly southern and western states, including Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg, the Rhineland and Palatinate regions, and Switzerland...During the second wave, from 1865 to 1875, Germans came to Wisconsin from northern areas such as Schleswig, Holstein, Hanover, and Westphalia...The years 1880 to 1890 marked the final and largest wave of 19th-century German immigration to the Badger State. Immigrants came from the northern and eastern regions of the German Empire, especially Brandenburg and Pomerania, and also from Silesia and Russia.

https://mki.wisc.edu/exhibits/npp/panel-02/

[King of Kensington]

Not only that, but the colonial era Germans were virtually all Protestant.

[King of Kensington]

A look at the 1860 census which had some data on specific German states:

https://medium.com/migration-issues/what-kind-of-german-are-we-78feab5184c7

[King of Kensington]

About 20% of German Americans are Catholic but higher in the Northeast and Midwest.

2014 General Social Survey:

Mid-Atlantic  36%
East North Central  31%
West North Central  38%

[King of Kensington]

These are very small sample sizes, and the lowest level of geography is the 9 census divisions.  And there's no proxy measure one can devise to distinguish German Protestants and Catholics.

In West South Central, 11% of German Americans are Catholic.

[King of Kensington]

Of all German Americans surveyed in 2014, 64% Protestant and 23% are Catholic.

https://sda.berkeley.edu/sdaweb/analysis/?dataset=gss14nw

To runs these tables, type in the variables "ethnic" and "relig1."  To filter by region, type in region(x) for the 9 regions.  Region 3 is East North Central for example.