Turning Pews into People: Estimating 19th Century Church Membership

data on religious affiliation. In this essay we use census data on churches to reconstruct detailed membership estimates for 1850, 1860, and 1870 by means of weighted least squares equations. We then assess the validity of our membership estimates by comparing them to surviving statistics for several denominations and by demonstrating the sensitivity of our rates to historical nuances. The results are reassuring. This means that scholars now will have adequate data to chart the growth of the denominations and the general increase in church membership in the 19th Century - not only for the nation, but broken down by regions and states. Historians of American religion wince in frustration when they examine the U.S. Census enumeration schedules for 1850, 1860 and 1870. During this period of extraordinary changes in the religious composition of the nation, each decade the census-takers carefully gathered information on every church congregation in the nation. Thus we are able to discover for each town and country how many places of worship each denomination had, the value of each church property, and the number of sittings (the seating capacity) of each church. But the census failed to record the number of members a church had.1 For lack of membership statistics, it has not been possible to quantify the sudden rise of American Catholicism beginning in the mid-1840s, the rapid growth achieved by the Methodists and Baptists, the waves of immigrant Protestant denominations, or the Westward movement of the churches. Indeed, although scholars agree that rates of church membership were much lower in the 19th Century than in the 20th, it has not been possible even to be reasonably precise about how much lower. Nor has it really been possible to examine regional variations in religious involvement. In short, while we have sophisticated quantitative studies of many major aspects of changing 19th Century American society, we have been denied means to examine religious developments and shifts. In this essay we recreate the missing religious statistics by transforming the counts of pew seats into counts of the persons who sat in those pews on an average Sunday. Then we shall try to establish the probable validity of these estimates. To do so, first