geographic counts of cult groups-data on the number of people who belong to cult move-ments are seldom available. This study, however, will be based primarily on informationabout
cult membership.
While actual membership statistics might seem the ideal measure ofcult activity, this is not necessarily so because of idiosyncracies in the historical develop-ment of some cult movements. We will consider a variety of data in this paper, but willdemonstrate that only some of these data are useful as measures of
local receptivity to cults.
In evaluating the 1926 data, we also will contrast cults of the twenties with cults of the sev-enties, thus assessing the stability of basic patterns.Only in other papers will we use these data in attempts to replicate tests of our theory.Here we wish to demonstrate the validity of some measures of cult activity in the 1920s,and to contribute to historical understanding of certain significant cult movements. Fi-nally, a major purpose of this paper is to bring to the attention of social scientists the exis-tence of an extraordinary wealth of good data on religion-data that have languished rela-tively unused for many decades in university libraries.
Rediscove.ring
tk
Religious Census
After attempting less complete surveys in the nineteenth century, beginning in 1906 the
U.S.
Bureau of the Census conducted an elaborate census of religious bodies every decadethrough 1936. Painstaking efforts and systematic procedures produced data of very highquality and great completeness. These data make it possible to compute church-member-ship rates for every city over 25,000, for every county, and for every state in the nation.The denominational composition of these units is also reported in exquisite detail. Alsoavailable is such information as the number and size of congregations, when congrega-tions were founded, the number of ministers, annual expenditures, missionary activity,sex ratios of congregations, and a host of other interesting data. Moreover, for each reli-gious body included, the census provides a first-rate summary of its history, doctrine andrituals.Even more important, the Census Bureau took an unusually broad view of what consti-tutes a religion. Hence, they not only gathered data on a host of small Christian sects,they also included many cults. Membership statistics on these cults are the basic source ofdata for this paper.Each of these four voluminous census reports warrants extensive analysis. But, we haveconcluded that 1926 is the best of the four. There was modest improvement in the scopeand completeness of each of the reports through 1926. Then, the great social dislocationscaused by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression were reflected in the 1936 census. Forexample, the number of Northern Baptist churches and church members increasedslightly between 1926 and 1936. But the number of Southern Baptist congregations de-clined by
40
percent between the two reports, and the number of Southern Baptists fell bynearly a million. This probably reflected the massive up-rooting of rural America, espe-cially in the Dust Bowl region. These missing Baptists were simply gone from the farmsand small towns where they had been in 1926 and had not yet showed up on the rolls ofBaptist churches elsewhere. How frustrating that the census ceased its studies ofreligion atthat point!For our purposes it seems best to use data for a relatively more settled and "normal" time.Thus we have coded data from the 1926 census to create a variety of rates.
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