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I notice when I'm out driving how many churches there are. This got me wondering just how many churches are in America (besides 'too many'😉. I googled this and find out that there are well over 300,000 churches in America. And yet more are being built every year.

jimdaughters 5 Jan 17
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I don't mind churches so much, just the purpose.

I find the architecture in older churches to be beautiful. Even better when abandoned, in my opinion. I love abandoned places.

Oh do I have a site for YOU! Go to opacity.us for beautiful, haunting, ethereal photos of abandoned places. I especially am drawn to asylums, mostly the Kirkbride models built in the late 19th and early 20th century. Many of these sites have been torn down - but there are Kirkbride Society members who attempt to save many of the most remarkable structures. Worth a read-up.

@Meleia Thank you! I LOVE Kirkbride asylums as well. There is one in Traverse City, Michigan that has been re-purposed as retail and residential space that I am dying to go to.

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Here's one you might like. It's designed by Andrew Gould, a Greek Orthodox architect :

I have my feeling that there are too many churches however, one can't argue with the fact that church architecture has wonderful examples of excellence. Just like in art such as Michelangelo's 'Pieta'.

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Religions have always made most of their ill gotten gains from real estate.

You don't have to pay tax of any kind on a place of worship.

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And that total probably does not include Mosques, Synagogues, Temples, convents, monasteries meeting houses, and other places or worship.

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The only hope is that there are only 15 ish churches in San Francisco for 1MM people. In Alamo where I am living for the next 2 months there are 3 churches for 15k people.
But in other places, you have 1 church for only a few hundred people and those churches because the center of the social village so if you do not attend you feel completely left out.

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That number sounds low.

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Does this include temples, mosques, and so on, other than churches but also clearly places of worship? I continue to be amused by those self-proclaimed atheists and agnostics whose focus is solely upon Christian beliefs, as though other religious beliefs do not exist or somehow fall into a radically different category.

I continue to be amused by ill informed people who make statements like the above on a site that has pages and groups dedicated to former Jews, Muslims and other former religions, without bothering to look first.

yes many here are former Christians or come from Christian backgrounds, that does not however mean that they cannot use that back ground as a typical frame of reference that by implication serves as a metonym for all religion generally.

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It's true! If you do not like the Pentecostal Oneness you can start the Third Baptist Church. This all happens because none of these people agree.

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I live in a town of roughly 30,000 people.
There are 51 churches, and 43 bars (according to a yellow pages search). Butte had a population around 100,000 when the mining industry was in full swing, and one or two deaths a week due to accidents or silicosis.
I work in a very rural part of North Dakota, where on the main roads the only structures that a person sees are churches and older (typically abandoned school buildings).

I wonder how many people are true believers, or just find it a means to find community with others in places that are remote, or have a high death rate?

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My daughter did a project at school, choosing to higlight the amount of churches with the racial divide in our neighborhood when she was in middle school. We discovered in our small neighborhood there were 17 churches.

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Come to UK churches are all being sold.

Or turned in to pubs, nightclubs and casinos.

I heard something about this. Very encouraging.

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read an article a bit back.
There are more churches than restaurants in the US

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