Should the Census Ask About Religion?

The census asks how old you are, how much you earn, how long your commute is, and how many bathrooms your home has. It has never asked what you believe. The United States runs the most detailed population count in the world and collects no official data on the religion of its own people, and that is not an accident or an oversight. It is the law. As the country's religious makeup shifts faster than at any point in living memory, it is worth asking whether that law still makes sense.

Why the census stays silent on religion

The rule is specific. A 1976 amendment to Title 13 of the U.S. Code, the statute that governs the census, states that a person may not be compelled to disclose information regarding their religious beliefs or membership in a religious body. Because answering the decennial census is mandatory, that sentence takes religion off the form entirely.

The reasoning, laid out at the time by Census Bureau director Vincent Barabba, was part constitutional and part practical. A religion question, he said, "would appear to infringe upon the traditional separation of church and state," and he warned that "controversy on this very sensitive issue could affect public cooperation in the census and thus jeopardize the success of the census." The concern was not hypothetical. The Bureau had tested a voluntary religion question on 40,000 households in 1957, and opposition from religious minorities, some of whom had fled countries where government lists of believers were used against them, helped kill any plan to put it on the 1960 count.

One detail in the law matters for the whole debate: the prohibition is on compelled disclosure. A voluntary question is not banned. The Bureau could, in principle, add a religion question to a survey people are free to skip, such as the American Community Survey, without Congress changing a word of the statute.

Who counts American religion now

Because the government will not ask, private research organizations have built the data instead, and they are the reason anyone can say how many Americans are Catholic, evangelical, Muslim, or unaffiliated.

The Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape Study and the Public Religion Research Institute's American Values Atlas are the two most cited, and both are serious, well-run surveys. But they are surveys, not counts. Even a large national sample gets thin when you slice it down to a small faith in a single county, and different organizations use different questions and methods, so their numbers do not always agree. There is no equivalent of the decennial census for religion: no full, official, once-a-decade enumeration.

The case for asking

Supporters of a religion question point out that faith is one of the largest dimensions of American life on which the government keeps no official data. The share of Americans who claim no religion, the so-called nones, has risen dramatically in a generation, and a lot of policy runs downstream of who lives where and believes what, from civil-rights and hate-crime enforcement to the placement of services for specific communities. Most peer countries already do this. The United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia all ask about religion on their national censuses and publish the results down to the neighborhood. And because a voluntary question is already legal here, adding one would not require reopening the statute, only the will to do it.

The case against

A government record of who believes what has been turned into a weapon often enough in history that wariness is rational, not paranoid, and the groups most exposed to that risk are frequently religious minorities. There is also the church-state concern that moved the 1976 Congress, and the practical worry that opened this section: if attaching a sensitive question to the census lowers response overall, it damages the accuracy of everything else the census measures. Private surveys, the argument goes, already answer the question well enough without putting the whole count at risk.

Where it stands

For the mandatory census, the door is firmly shut, and opening it would take an act of Congress against a half-century of bipartisan reluctance. The realistic path, if there is one, is a voluntary question on the American Community Survey, which the Bureau has the authority to add and has so far chosen not to. Until it does, the official portrait of America will keep a blank space where religion would go, and the country will keep learning about its own faith from everyone except its own census.

For more on what the census does collect and how those decisions get made, see our explainers on the purpose of a census and the recent fight over how it measures race and ethnicity, or explore the data it does gather for any place at a glance.

Sources

The legal history and the Barabba quotes are from the Pew Research Center, "Why the U.S. census doesn't ask Americans about their religion" (2023) and "A Brief History of Religion and the U.S. Census" (2010). Current U.S. religion data comes from private surveys including the Pew Religious Landscape Study and the PRRI American Values Atlas.