"What is your religious affiliation". Seems perfectly innocuous, but turned out to be retroactively fatal if your answer could be attributed to you by a certain foreign occupier in the 1940s .
How does knowing your religious affiliation help them with any of this?
You're saying it's farfetched, yet census data was already used as a tool to assist an extermination campaign:
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/rearvision/the-dark-s...
Let's say your town has a lot of pig farmers. The pig farmers are afraid their business is diminishing. So they lobby the local government to put a tax on chicken and beef, to encourage more pork consumption. Which local officials might be inclined to do for economic reasons. But then you collect religious data, and it turns out 50% of the population is Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu. So half the population now has to pay a tax, which is effectively a tax on their religion, because their religious belief says they can't eat pork.
This is a made up example, but the point is that you need to know about your citizens so you can make just laws that respect those citizens (and encourage businesses, job training, etc based on demographics). It's why we have a census.
It’s much better if the farmers directly tell you what they want and the city folk tell you what they want and together they figure it out.
Census details is great for understanding long term trends. It’s not to be used directly for decision making, even if the intention is good, and the intentions have also been very bad.
That's basically exactly how they get made. You don't know anything about the agriculture checkoff in the US, do you?
Every single pound of pork sold or produced in the US sent a tiny amount of it's sale price to the "Pork. The Other White Meat" campaign: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork._The_Other_White_Meat
> laws made that way usually aren’t good.
I don't think anyone said they were good laws.
It was literally introduced for the decision making I mentioned. The US Census was introduced for the reasons of creating better representation for the actual, specific populations in the US.
In 1810, the Census started collecting information on manufacturing and manufactured products, and later agriculture. In 1850, it collected social data, including religious information. It has expanded many times over the years, in order to collect the data needed to more accurately serve the needs of the people. It started counting Native Americans in 1860, stopped counting Slaves in 1870, and started counting Native Americans living on Reservations in 1890. Over the years additional entries have been added as different peoples have immigrated, changes to the country (like the Great Depression), and in 2020 for the first time, questions asking about same-sex couples/spouses/partners.
These questions may seem invasive, but they actually help protect vulnerable people, by showing the number of people who are impacted by the economy, by policy, and more.
I can think of at least of one European country that does not collect religious, racial and ethnic data during their census. They collect socioeconomic and another but not these. Germany does not do a census at all.
Yep, France - and it hides the massive structural racial disparities and makes it all the more difficult for them to redress (not that they appear to really care to, France is one of the more racist western european countries).
What?
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksz%C3%A4hlung_in_Deutschla...
Boy were the Germans happy to find these.
The American obsession with asking for people their perceived origins (AAPI, AA, Latino, ...) is more than weird: it's downright dangerous. Don't fucking ask these questions, and never, ever write it down, especially not with names.
Thankfully, now they can just buy it from data brokers and let Palantir target, so that makes life easier for them
Knowing someone is algerian, muslim or black doesn't help you fix inequalities. It doesn't help in the US, or anywhere else in the world. Racial statistics are useless. We know where poverty is.
1. How many people were living or staying in this house, apartment, or mobile home on April 1, 2020?
2. Were there any additional people staying here on April 1, 2020 that you did not include in Question 1?
3. Is this house, apartment, or mobile home?
4. What is your telephone number?
5. What is Person 1’s name?
6. What is Person 1’s sex?
7. What is Person 1’s age and what is Person 1’s date of birth?
8. Is Person 1 of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin?
9. What is Person 1’s race?
Nothing really stops you from lying either.
And race is a pretty big one under the current administration which has had hundreds of legal immigrants arrested for weeks to months off of "suspicion" that for lack of concrete evidence could only amount to racial profiling.
You know how you target best based on ideology? Not the damn census. Social media. What you post, who you follow, all of that stuff we forgot that ICE was getting from travelers at the border imaging their cellphone. That stuff is far more accurate to what you are today, right now, at this minute, and where you fall in light of this regime, and what risk you present to the state and its power structures.
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys.html
The American Community Survey is the most well-known, as it replaced the “long form” sampling that had been an extension to the Census.
then, make it so your answer is more valid than if they asked what you usually have for breakfast.
i guarantee you more gov actions can be positively impacted by the breakfast question than the religion one.
the ONLY use for religious data is to get it for free for campaigns.
Don’t some religions not get along very well?
Given your criteria, what should be asked? Check the boxes for the physical and mental illnesses you have? What’s your BMI? How much time do you spend online? What percent of your diet is highly processed foods?
Is gender/sex also nonsensical? Is languages spoken also nonsensical?
Isn’t (non) taxation of religious institutions an ongoing debate? Wouldn’t knowing religious census data aid in exploring that?
Those are two things that’s popped into my head immediately. If I thought about it for an extended period of time, especially if I knew more about governed t and law, I’m sure there would be other avenues of consideration.
For example, the US can have a law banning or allowing face coverings, but cannot have a law allowing face covering for members of one religion but not others.
nobody still managed to reply the answer: what will do govt DO based on the data?
Also are you sure there isnt less than 50% religious people already?
Edit: As I research a bit further, I have stumbled upon an interesting counterargument [1] that enumeration of ethnicity and ethnic groups results in "more political discrimination and state-sponsored violence targeting ethnic groups". Perhaps a similar conclusion could be reached about religious census information.
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369183X.2025.2...
no person shall be compelled to disclose information relative to his religious beliefs or to membership in a religious body.
https://www.congress.gov/94/statute/STATUTE-90/STATUTE-90-Pg...
Doesn't that mean they can ask that question with an option for "rather not disclose"?