Christian sites — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each point is a Christian site of any kind recorded in OpenStreetMap — churches, chapels and cathedrals, but also churchyards and cemeteries, wayside crosses and shrines, monasteries and convents, church schools, diocesan offices and deconsecrated churches. Over 1.6 million worldwide, drawn as a dot sized by footprint area and coloured by what kind of site it is. At the closest zooms the dot is joined by the building's mapped outline, where one has been drawn.

This is the largest map on this website, about five times the size of the next largest religion map.

This is the companion to the places of worship map, which colours every religion's places of worship by religion. This one takes a single religion and shows everything of it that is mapped.

Click any site to see what OpenStreetMap records about it — the kind of site it is, and its denomination where that was recorded. Where the site has a Wikipedia article, a short summary is fetched live and shown in your own language; and every site links to the OpenStreetMap object it came from.

A fifth of this map is Central European roadside crosses

That needs saying before anything else, because it shapes what you see more than any other single fact here.

370,000 of these sites — 22% of the map — are wayside crosses and shrines, and they are overwhelmingly in the Alpine countries, Poland, Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic. They are genuinely there and they are genuinely Christian. Their density is a fact about European mapping culture at least as much as about European Christianity.

Two decisions produced that, and it is worth knowing both:

1. This site's historic sites map deliberately leaves wayside crosses off, precisely because they are near-universal in one region and near-absent elsewhere, so mapping them would draw a picture of where the mappers are rather than of where history is. That decision was reversed here: on a map whose subject is Christian sites, wayside crosses are the subject. 2. About 200,000 crosses carrying no religion tag at all are then included, on the evidence that a wayside cross is Christian by construction — 99.9% of tagged ones say so. That roughly doubled the class.

If you want the map without them, the legend lets you hide the marker class.

Where it is, and how much of that to believe

The top eight countries hold 54% of this map. The counts alone are misleading, so here they are beside a rough rate per million people:

| | | | |---|---|---| | United States | 284,150 | ~840 per million | | Germany | 121,127 | ~1,450 | | Italy | 102,408 | ~1,730 | | France | 86,063 | ~1,320 | | Poland | 80,688 | ~2,120 | | Brazil | 49,641 | ~230 | | Ukraine | 21,338 | | | India | 12,857 | ~9 | | Nigeria | 2,242 | ~10 |

Poland's rate is around two hundred times Nigeria's, and that is mapping density rather than Christianity. Nigeria has more church buildings than Germany does. Brazil, with 215 million people and the largest Catholic population on earth, has 49,641 sites against Germany's 121,127.

One artefact is separable and worth naming rather than leaving implied: the United States' 284,150 is inflated by a bulk import of place records from a government database, which is a wholesale addition rather than the product of anyone mapping. That is why the USA leads on raw count while sitting mid-table per person.

Colour

Colour shows what kind of site it is, not which religion — the religion is the whole map. All ten kinds appear, and this is the only one of the nine maps where every row is well populated:

Place of worship — the church, chapel or cathedral itself. 58% of this map, the lowest share of any religion map here for the reason described above.
Marker — wayside crosses and shrines. 22%.
Religious building — a building tagged as a church or chapel that no other rule named. 8%.
Burial site — churchyards and cemeteries. 6.5%.
Grounds, school, former site, office, monastery, community building — each present, in thousands or tens of thousands.

The former site row holds 13,661 deconsecrated churches, ruins and chapels — buildings that were Christian sites and are not now. It is drawn in grey rather than as one more kind of active site, because its meaning is an absence.

Which sites count as Christian

A site is on this map when OpenStreetMap's `religion` tag says `christian`, or when it is a church, chapel or cathedral building, or a wayside cross.

The tag is read generously rather than literally. Sites recorded under a denomination instead of the religion — twenty-two different spellings, `catholic` and `evangélica` among them — are folded in, as are capitalised and multi-value forms. A site tagged for more than one religion at once appears on both maps, because it genuinely belongs to both.

The map inherits the tag's mistakes along with its truths. Several hundred buildings recorded as churches are tagged with another religion, some of them genuine conversions and some mistakes, and nothing in the data separates the two.

Size

Each symbol is sized by footprint area — the ground the mapped outline covers, in square metres measured on the globe. Symbol area is proportional to footprint, so a site four times the area draws twice as wide.

About 40% of these sites are mapped as a single point with no outline, and so have no footprint. Many of them are wayside crosses, which have nothing to trace and are not lesser sites for it. Rather than draw them all at the smallest size, they are given a nominal, typical size.

Churches are drawn as though their footprint were twice its real size — about 1.4 times the width. This is a deliberate weighting, and the only one on the map. A church is a building; a cemetery is a field and a church school has playing fields. The weighting is small enough to leave the real order intact.

The largest site on this map is Waldiba in Ethiopia at 973 square kilometres — an Orthodox monastic territory, mapped as religious grounds. It is real, not a mapping error, and it is the only site on the map above 5 square kilometres.

Sites with no name

63% of the sites here carry a name, and the unnamed ones are shown just the same. A site with no name is one nobody has recorded a name for, not one that is not there — and a wayside cross very often has no name to record.

A picture of the present

Today's map, not a history. OpenStreetMap is edited continuously; this copy is refreshed periodically. There is no year control, and a site closed or converted long ago may still be mapped until a mapper updates it.

Source and licence

Back to the map