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States & Territories

California

West

California's religious geography starts with the chain of twenty one Spanish Franciscan missions Junipero Serra and his successors built along the coast from San Diego to Sonoma between 1769 and 1823, converting and often coercing the Indigenous population along the way. Gold Rush immigration then made the state one of the most religiously diverse in the country within a generation. Los Angeles became the unlikely birthplace of modern Pentecostalism at the Azusa Street Revival of 1906, and the state has since incubated an unusual share of new religious movements, from the Vedanta Society's early Hindu missions to Zen centers, Scientology and the human potential movement.

Facts
Identity
Jurisdiction Status
U.S. state 1
Law and State
Establishment Status
No Establishment 1
California's first constitution, adopted on statehood in 1850, provided for no established church, following the pattern already set by every state admitted after the original thirteen.
Religion
Leading Religious Affiliation
Catholic 2
California: Catholic is 25% of adults, ahead of Nothing in particular at 20%. Margin of error plus or minus 2.4 points. Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/state/california/
Geography
Census Region
West 1
Origins
Origin of the Name
Taken from a mythical island paradise ruled by the warrior queen Calafia in the early sixteenth century Spanish romance Las Sergas de Esplandian, applied by Spanish explorers to the peninsula they believed was an island. 1
Learn More
From Mission Bells to a Revival on Azusa Street

The chain of twenty one Spanish Franciscan missions Junipero Serra and his successors built along the California coast between 1769 and 1823 was, on the church's own terms, an evangelizing project, and modern scholarship on Serra has been explicit that the conversions it produced relied heavily on coercion, forced labor and a mission system that devastated Indigenous populations through disease and disruption of traditional life, a history the state and the church have both had to reckon with directly in recent decades rather than treat as settled. The missions nonetheless remain the oldest continuous thread of organized religion in the state and shaped its earliest colonial geography from San Diego to Sonoma.

A century later California became the source of a very different kind of religious history. The Azusa Street Revival, beginning in 1906 in a converted livery stable in Los Angeles under the leadership of William Seymour, a Black preacher and the son of formerly enslaved parents, is treated by historians of the movement as the founding event of modern global Pentecostalism, a tradition that by the early twenty first century had grown into one of the largest branches of Christianity worldwide. The revival's own interracial worship, unusual for the period, was itself part of what participants and later scholars read as evidence of the Spirit at work. California kept producing new religious movements after Azusa Street as well, from the Vedanta Society's early Hindu missionary presence to Zen centers and the human potential movement, an unusually high concentration of religious innovation for one state across three centuries.

Connections

Associated With

The Reverberation of the Sacred Gurbani's Vibrations at the Darbar Sahib, the Issue of Its Television Broadcasting (Religions), Sources

This source names California directly: "the Study of Religion, University of California, Riverside, examining the history and contested politics of televised Gurbani broadcast from the Darbar Sahib."

Source The Reverberation of the Sacred Gurbani's Vibrations at the Darbar Sahib, the Issue of Its Television Broadcasting (Religions)
Tsubaki Grand Shrine Of America (Wikipedia), Sources

This source names California directly: "Reliable for the shrine's 1986 founding in Stockton, California, by Rev."

Source Tsubaki Grand Shrine Of America (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
Tsubaki Grand Shrine Opens The First Shinto Shrine On The US Mainland, Spread Events

This source names California directly: "Grand Shrine of America in Stockton, California, the first Shinto shrine built on the US mainland since the Second World War."

Source Tsubaki Grand Shrine Of America (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
UC Berkeley Archaeological Research Facility's Own Page for Ask an Archaeologist, Episode 7, Sources

This source names California directly: "The University of California, Berkeley's own Archaeological Research Facility page for its own "Ask an Archaeologist" video series, hosting Episode 7, "Examining Etruscan Eggs: Life, Afterlife and..."

Source UC Berkeley Archaeological Research Facility's Own Page for Ask an Archaeologist, Episode 7
Wodziwob, Historical Figures

This source names California directly: "The movement spread from Nevada into California and the Plateau region during the 1870s, where local prophets reshaped it into several distinct traditions, including the Earth Lodge cult and, later..."

Source The 1870 Ghost Dance (Du Bois)Cora Du Bois
World Vision International, Organizations

This source names California directly: "with dual headquarters in Monrovia, California and London, United Kingdom, and its staff draw on various Christian traditions and other faiths."

Source World Vision International (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
World Vision International (Wikipedia), Sources

This source names California directly: "dual headquarters in Monrovia, California and London, United Kingdom."

Source World Vision International (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
Zarathushtrian Assembly, Organizations

Current headquarters state (Santa Ana), distinct from the 1990 founding city of Los Angeles already on record; no Santa Ana entity is live in this atlas.

Source Zarathushtrian Assembly, "About Us"Zarathushtrian Assembly

Showing 51 to 58 of 58 in Associated With, page 2 of 2.

Regions Where This Is Principal

Roman Catholicism, Denominations

Plurality religious identification among the state's adults per the source's survey, not a claim of religious establishment or an outright population majority.

Source Pew Research Center: 2023-24 Religious Landscape StudyPew Research Center

Societies Attested Here

New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn, Denominations

Founded in Berkeley, California in 1967-1970 as a college class project that continued as a working coven and Wiccan denomination.

Source New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
Sources
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2024View the Source
2. Pew Research Center: 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study
Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 2025View the Source
Junipero Serra: California's Founding Father
Steven W. Hackel, Hill and Wang, 2013
The Azusa Street Mission and Revival: The Birth of the Global Pentecostal Movement
Cecil M. Robeck Jr., Thomas Nelson, 2006
A Religious History of the American People
Sydney E. Ahlstrom, Yale University Press, 1972View the Source
New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia contributors, WikipediaSocieties Attested Here: New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden DawnView the Source
Zarathushtrian Assembly, "About Us"
Zarathushtrian Assembly, Zarathushtrian AssemblyAssociated With: Zarathushtrian AssemblyView the Source
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