Mapping American Congregations Using the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies

For four decades, the U.S. Census Bureau ran a census about religion separate from its main population census. The Census of Religious Bodies published reports for 1906, 1916, 1926, and 1936. (A fifth census in 1946 was never completed.) The schedules—that is, the forms filled out by religious congregations—survive for only the 1926 census. But the approximately 230,000 forms collected from religious congregations provide a rich source for understanding American religion in urban and rural space.

American historians have made significant use of the population censuses, especially as the schedules from past population censuses become available. Once digitized, the Religious Bodies promises to offer the same usefulness to historians of American religion, but also to local historians, urban historians, and scholars in other fields. With the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Religious Ecologies project at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is digitizing the schedules of the 1926 census and transcribing them into a dataset (https://religiousecologies.org). Once complete, the resulting collection of schedules will be the largest and most comprehensive data source for religion at a snapshot of time in U.S. history.

This poster will visually present the history of the Religious Bodies Census as well as what can be learned from it. We will first show examples of digitized census schedules, show both the information that can be learned from the form as well as the process by which the Census Bureau gathered the data. Next, we will demonstrate how we are transcribing the data, showing viewers the process of turning digitized documents into clean, structured data usable by any scholar. And finally, we will show how we are creating interactive digital maps of the data. We will show examples of how we are mapping city-level data for all denominations across the country, as well as more targeted maps about specific denominations or places.

In short, viewers will visually learn about the most significant effort by the state to collect religious data in U.S. history, and they will also see how the data that has been collected can be put to the purposes of historical inquiry. We will show how different kinds of religious groups occupied the different kinds of spaces—national, regional, and urban or rural.