Digitizing the Census of Religious Bodies

“How can we go forward if we do not understand our past? ”

Team Members/Contributors

Melissa J Wilde University of Pennsylvania Contact Me

About this project grant for researchers

More than a century ago, the US government expended significant resources documenting the financial, material, and human resources of all of the religious organizations in the country—ultimately detailing data on more than 200 denominations, and 220,000 congregations. Known as the Census of Religious Bodies (or CRBs), these incredible sources of historical data were gathered in 1906, 1916, 1926 and 1936. This proposal seeks funding for research assistance to enter, clean and analyze these volumes, the vast majority of which have never been available to either researchers or the institutions that provided them in any usable form.