Mapping America's Religious Landscape
In the nineteenth century, the U.S. government collected data about churches as part of its decennial population census, but when Congress created the Census Bureau as a permanent agency in 1902, it authorized it to undertake a separate decennial survey of “religious bodies.” Every ten years from 1906 to 1946, the U.S. Census Bureau surveyed congregations, synagogues, and other religious groups in the United States.
While the Census Bureau published summary reports from that data, the forms (or schedules) filled out by each congregation have not been widely used. Only the schedules from the 1926 Census survive, housed in a collection at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, DC.
A schedule filled out by an Adventist congregation in rural North Carolina in 1926.
1926 U.S. Census of Religious Bodies
Top 25 Denominations by Schedule Count
Top 25 Counties by Schedule Count
| County, State | Count |
|---|---|
| Cook, IL | 1,805 |
| Los Angeles, CA | 1,250 |
| Philadelphia, PA | 1,186 |
| Allegheny, PA | 1,155 |
| Jefferson, AL | 798 |
| Wayne, MI | 719 |
| Cuyahoga, OH | 603 |
| Kings, NY | 587 |
| New York, NY | 582 |
| Middlesex, MA | 559 |
| Erie, NY | 558 |
| Baltimore City (ic), MD | 553 |
| St. Louis City, MO | 509 |
| Hamilton, OH | 491 |
| Shelby, AR | 464 |
| Worcester, MA | 463 |
| Schuylkill, PA | 458 |
| Westmoreland, PA | 456 |
| Luzerne, PA | 434 |
| Jackson, MO | 428 |
| Lancaster, PA | 418 |
| Jefferson, KY | 387 |
| Marion, IN | 386 |
| Westchester, NY | 385 |
| Fulton, GA | 380 |
Why "Religious Ecologies"?
American communities have always been shaped by diverse and evolving religious environments. Rather than focusing on individual denominations in isolation, the Religious Ecologies project documents the complex interactions between different faith traditions, institutions, and practices that together form the religious landscape of American places.
Our approach reveals how religious communities influenced one another, competed for adherents, and adapted to local social and economic conditions. This ecological perspective provides new insights into American religious history and its relationship to broader patterns of social change.
Congregation Sha'arai Shomayim, Mobile, Alabama, c. 1910.
Learn about the U.S. Census of Religious Bodies
While some Americans have lived in rich religious ecologies, surrounded by a plethora of denominational choices, others have lived in places with only one or a few religious options. Using new and existing datasets, American Religious Ecologies documents and maps these environments. How did certain groups come to thrive in particular places, and how were they divided by race and social class? Did cities, towns, and rural areas feature meaningful religious pluralism and diversity, or were they dominated by some particular religious group? How did the balance of diversity and dominance vary across space and time?
While scholars have often studied the religious ecology of a particular city or place, studying how those ecologies varied across the nation has been difficult because of the lack of data that is available. The American Religious Ecologies project is creating new datasets from historical sources and new ways of visualizing them so that we can better understand the history of American religion.