NAWD, the North Alabama Worldview Directory, lists congregations and communities of every faith and belief system. This page explains where our information comes from and how we decide what to include.
How listings are built
Listings are compiled from public sources and then improved by the community. Anyone can register, suggest a correction, claim a listing for their own congregation, or add a place we have missed. Contact details that have not been confirmed are marked as such, and edits from new contributors are reviewed before they appear.
How faiths and belief systems are chosen
We start from the seven top-level groups used in Pew Research Center’s global study, then add smaller and newer traditions named in broader overviews such as Wikipedia’s Major religious groups article. Belief systems such as secular, agnostic, atheist, spiritual and deist worldviews are included alongside faiths, because they are part of the full spectrum of how people live and believe, even where there is no building or congregation. Some traditions have no listing in North Alabama yet. We show them anyway and invite the community to add one.
A note on names
Islam is the religion and a Muslim is a follower of Islam. Where we label a category by its people (for example Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu), we mean the community of followers, which is how listings such as mosques, churches, synagogues and temples relate to a category.
Reference sources
- Pew Research Center, How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020 (2025). The backbone for our top-level groups: Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, other religions and the religiously unaffiliated. Based on more than 2,700 censuses and surveys covering 201 countries and territories.
- Wikipedia, Major religious groups. A broad overview that also lists mid-sized and smaller traditions and new religious movements, which guided which smaller faiths we added.
- Pew Research Center, Religious Landscape Study. U.S. religious identity and belief, including the religiously unaffiliated.
- Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA), U.S. Religion Census. County-level counts of congregations and adherents reported by religious bodies, used as a check on local coverage.
- World Religion Database (Brill). Country-level religious demographics compiled from censuses, surveys and religious communities.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, Religion. Reference descriptions of traditions and terminology.
- Our World in Data, Religion. Charts and context built on survey and census data.
- Adherents.com. A long-running compilation of adherent estimates by religion, now archived. Useful for historical comparison.
About the numbers
Estimates of how many people belong to each tradition differ between sources because they define membership differently. Some count self-identification in surveys, others count members reported by religious bodies. We cite these sources for context and do not treat any single figure as exact. Narratives on faith pages are written to be respectful and accurate, and we welcome corrections from members of each tradition.
Map and place data: Some place details (locations, addresses, websites and phone numbers) come from OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License. Each record notes its source and how confident we are in it.