Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

A Brief History of Religion and the U.S. Census

by Anne Farris Rosen, Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life.
January 26, 2010

Public debate over the propriety, merit and feasibility of the Census Bureau asking questions about religion has waxed and waned over many decades with religious groups, civil liberty groups, social scientists and the Census Bureau's own staff divided over the issue.

The U.S. Census Bureau has not asked questions about religion since the 1950s, but the federal government did gather some information about religion for about a century before that. Starting in 1850, census takers began asking a few questions about religious organizations as part of the decennial census that collected demographic and social statistics from the general population as well as economic data from business establishments. Federal marshals and assistant marshals, who acted as census takers until after the Civil War, collected information from members of the clergy and other religious leaders on the number of houses of worship in the U.S. and their respective denominations, seating capacities and property values....

In 1880, census takers started collecting more in-depth information from religious leaders on topics ranging from average worship attendance to church income, expenditures and debt. The scope of inquiry about religion was expanded again in 1890, when census takers gathered information about the number of ministers in each denomination. Classifications for the denominations also were more detailed. The reported number of denominations in the 1890 census totaled 145, most grouped into 18 families.

There were no other significant changes in data collection on religious bodies until 1902, when the U.S. Census Bureau was established as a permanent government agency and census officials decided to separate some data collection from the regular decennial census. This led to the statutory creation of the Census of Religious Bodies, which began in 1906 as a stand-alone census to be taken every 10 years....

"As its name implies, this is a census of the religious organizations in the United States rather than of individuals classified according to their religious affiliation," the Census Bureau explained in its report on the 1906 Census of Religious Bodies. The 1906 Census of Religious Bodies was the most thorough compilation of religious organizations to date. It reported a total of 186 denominations, most grouped into 27 families. One reason for the increased number of denominations since 1890 was the influx of immigrants to America....The Census of Religious Bodies was conducted every 10 years until 1946....

There was a concerted campaign by researchers, some leaders in the Catholic Church and Census Bureau Director Robert W. Burgess, an economist and statistician, to include a "What is your religion?" question in the 1960 Census of Population. But Burgess eventually decided against it after receiving vocal opposition from some religious and civil liberties groups. "[A]t this time a considerable number of persons would be reluctant to answer such a question in the [c]ensus where a reply is mandatory," Burgess stated in 1957 when he agreed not to include a question on religion. "Under the circumstances, it was not believed that the value of the statistics based on this question would be great enough to justify overriding such an attitude. Cost factors were also a consideration." Burgess said the decision did not preclude the inclusion of a question on religion in a future census.

Neither Burgess' decision nor the discontinuation of the Census of Religious Bodies signaled the complete end to data collection on religion by the Census Bureau, however.

Read the full report at pewforum.org

For more on the census, check out "All Things Census," a gathering place for frequent postings about census methodology, findings and resources at census.pewsocialtrends.org

This essay was originally published in 2008 as an appendix to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey.