Religion as Identity in Postwar America: The Last Serious Attempt to Put a Question on Religion in the United States Census.

CENSUS; RELIGION; AMERICAN Jews; CATHOLICS; SOCIAL status; ECONOMIC status; U.S. Census Bureau; SOCIAL order

The article reports on the controversy surrounding a question proposed for the 1960 United States census and the two year debate over it. In 1956 the Bureau of the Census brought up the ideas of whether or not the 1960 survey would record the religion of respondents, the first time history that the census had sought such information. In the United States of the 1950s religion was a powerful social signifier, almost as important to social standing as race. In proposing to classify Americans by religion, the Census Bureau aroused the ire of American Jews, while the proposal had the strong support of the Catholic Church. For American Catholics their numbers would indicate that their religion had been absorbed into the social fabric of the United States. America Jews, with memories of the Holocaust still fresh, felt that codifying their numbers and their socio-economic status would lead to a resurgence of the anti-Semitism experienced in the 1930s and 1940s. Protestant sects had long dominated the American mainstream and were largely indifferent to the matter. Ultimately, the question was not on the 1960 census nor on any that followed.