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

Abstract

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