The epicenter of the component Evangelical tradition was (and is to this day, within the UCC) Saint Louis, Missouri, with a particularly heavy concentration of parishes within a 75-mile radius, in Missouri and Illinois. Elsewhere, Evangelicals tended to settle in large cities of the Midwest, including Cincinnati, Louisville, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Chicago. Rural Evangelical strongholds included southwestern Indiana, southern Michigan and Iowa. In the Southern United States, the ESNA was found primarily in central Texas and New Orleans. These concentrations of German settlement also witnessed a large influx of more confessionally-oriented Lutherans, who formed the current-day Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod in opposition to the syncretism they believed the Evangelicals represented. Almost all other of the contemporaneous Germans were Roman Catholic.