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“Numbering Israel”: The U.S. Census and Religious Organizations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
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“There simply are no reliable historical statistics on church membership,” writes a prominent sociologist of religion, Glock (1959: 39), “and it is extremely doubtful that accurate statistics can be produced through manipulating the unreliable ones.” Problems have so regularly hampered the collection of religious statistics in the United States that historians as well normally hold them in disrepute (Landis, 1957). “Nothing is more elusive in church history,” Littell (1971: 36) has written, “than honest statistics.” Commager (1950: 166) goes further: “Church statistics,” he charges, “attain an unreliability that would be a penal offense in a corporation.”
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- Copyright © Social Science History Association 1984
Footnotes
fn00
Author’s Note: I wish to thank Robert C. Liebman, John F. Wilson, and especially Robert Wuthnow for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.
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