(ANALYSIS) Here’s a fun fact, the United States Census Bureau is prohibited from asking questions about religion on the decennial census. That’s the big data collection effort that is conducted every decade to get an accurate headcount of the United States for purposes of apportionment.

The reason was articulated succinctly by the director of the bureau in 1976, Vincent P. Barabba:

Asking such a question in the decennial census, in which replies are mandatory, would appear to infringe upon the traditional separation of church and [s]tate. Regardless of whether this perception is legally sound, controversy on this very sensitive issue could affect public cooperation in the census and thus jeopardize the success of the census.

Just a few months later, Congress passed a law that officially prohibited the Census Bureau from asking questions about religious beliefs or church membership. So, we have been kind of flying blind when it comes to American religion for quite a while. I actually wrote a chapter for “20 Myths About Religion and Politics in America” that got scrapped. The title was, “We Can Get An Accurate Count of the Religious Composition of the United States.” It was eventually published at Religion Unplugged (and no one read it.)

But, there’s been a big development in this arena in the last few months. The Census Bureau has rolled out a new instrument it calls the Household Pulse Survey. The stated goal is “to produce data on critical social and economic matters affecting American households.” The bureau wants this one to be deployed quickly and the results disseminated to key stakeholders in real time so that they can better understand what’s happening in the country right now, not a year ago.

And, guess what? The survey asked a question about religious attendance. Of course it didn’t ask it in the way that I would like, but I will take what I can get at this point. One thing that I wanted to focus on in this first pass is the religiosity of major metropolitan areas. I’ve written about this before — the perception is that American cities are wastelands where religion goes to die.

But here’s an angle that I have not considered before: Are there certain metropolitan areas that are more religious than other ones? I wanted to answer questions like which cities are the least and most churched in the United States. And do demographic factors like age, race, income and education have a different impact on religious attendance if I compare Los Angeles to Chicago? Let’s get to the graphs.

To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s post, click here.

Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.