The Pint Vs. The Pulpit

Here’s an interesting bit of statistics about beer and religion from Floating Sheep. Entitled Church or Beer? Americans on Twitter, to put together a set if data they “selected all geotagged tweets sent within the continental US between June 22 and June 28 (about 10 million in total) and extracted all tweets containing the word “church” (17,686 tweets of which half originated on Sunday) or “beer” (14,405 tweets which are much more evenly distributed throughout the week)” and then created an infographic map of the United States based on where the tweets were originating, by county. I’m pleased to see the county where I live came in at “much more beer” though curiously, right next door, Napa was tweeting about “much more church.” They should have checked wine, I guess.

Click here to see the map full size.

Some additional insights from Floating Sheep:

San Francisco has the largest margin in favor of “beer” tweets (191 compared to 46 for “church”) with Boston (Suffolk county) running a close second. Los Angeles has the distinction of containing the most tweets overall (busy, busy thumbs in Southern California). In contrast, Dallas, Texas wins the FloatingSheep award for most geotagged tweets about “church” with 178 compared to only 83 about “beer.”

And finally, this:

We also note that this map strongly aligns with the famous ‘red state’/’blue state’ map from the 2000, 2004, and 2008 elections with a strong “religious right” component in the Southeastern United States and a more liberal, or at least beer-tweeting, Northeast and upper Midwest.