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Religion as Identity in Postwar America: The Last Serious Attempt to Put a Question on Religion in the United States Census
Kevin M. Schultz
| To American Jews, the proposal seemed a clear "violation" of the separation between "Church and State" that, in the shadow of the Holocaust, appeared a frightening means of centralized control. To Catholics, the proposal's success would have achieved a "long desired objective," and so the Catholic Church in America threw all its institutional weight behind the measure. To most Protestants, the issue was less contentious, perhaps because it was all so new. In the 1957 words of the Christian Century, the nondenominational voice of the Protestant establishment, because "religious affiliation has become hardly more than a matter of sociological identification in America," many Protestants were hard put to understand all the fuss about just "another automatized item punched on an ibm card." But there they were, three sides embroiled in a two-year debate about whether the federal government should put a question about religion on the United States census of 1960.1 |
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If the Bureau of the Census had succeded in getting the question approved, it would have been the first time the 170-year-old decennial census had asked such a question. Because the United States government has always been shy about asking its citizens about their religious beliefs, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it had become axiomatic in government circles that such questions, requested in official form, would infringe on rights protected by the free exercise and the establishment of religion clauses of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Yet after World War II, American religious identities had acquired such an important social role that the federal government seriously contemplated locating and identifying Americans by their institutional religious affiliation. In unusually dramatic fashion, from 1956 to 1958 the United States Census Bureau publicly debated whether it would put a question on religion in the 1960 census. The possibility of the federal government venturing so deep into unknown terrain sparked a nationwide debate on the merits and demerits of tabulating people by their religion. The discussion escalated within government circles, and the dispute went all the way to President Dwight D. Eisenhower before it was resolved.2 |
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Historians have barely noted the debate. A flurry of newspaper and magazine articles commented during the discussion, and within two years of its conclusion, a few sociologists such as William Petersen and Dorothy Good examined the subject in short articles. The only lengthy treatment of the debate was a firsthand account, published in 1961 as a pamphlet, that lacked sufficient critical distance to draw significant historical conclusions. Since the 1961 pamphlet, the debate has been largely absent from scholarly literature.3 |
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