Coming from a certain european country, you never know what answer on the census might get you into trouble.
"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 .
They don't ask about religious affiliation on the census.
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.
Right, but the entire damn point is privacy protections enable people to be more honest. The entire point is supposed to be good data so we can make informed population wide decisions.
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.
Administration doesn't care about race, but conservative in groups and liberal out groups. Race is a sort of proxy drumbbeat to appease the most stupid of their base. This is why people like Marco Rubio or Scott Turner are part of the in group despite the seeming cognitive dissonance there. There are a shocking number of black and latino people in this country who do in fact support this regime. There are gay republicans. Muslim republicans. All of this is tolerated by the in group if they are ideologically conservative.
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.
Surely any such foreign occupier would just demand the unredacted data?
Exactly why a government may refrain from collecting such data, as it is not even relevant in any kind of policy decision.
What, religious data? Are you serious? That's one of the most critical things they can track about their citizens.
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.
Laws aren’t made that way and laws made that way usually aren’t good. Like a farmer writing rules for people in the city or vice versa purely based on what they think the other side wants.
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.
Surely you know the history being referenced here.
Yes, which is why the government shouldn't have this data at all in the first place.
Say you get your way, and, for fear of Mark Carney rolling the tanks in and taking over North America, the US stops collecting any data on its citizens. How is the IRS supposed to know how much tax to expect from you? How is SNAP supposed to determine your eligibility? How is unemployment supposed to know if you're ripping them off or not? Data privacy is a real concern, but you need PII to run government services effectively. Running a state without collecting PII is like running a hospital without collecting any.
> How is the IRS supposed to know how much tax to expect from you? How is SNAP supposed to determine your eligibility? How is unemployment supposed to know if you're ripping them off or not?
How does knowing your religious affiliation help them with any of this?
"Collecting data" is what helps them.
They should follow the principle of least privilege. Why not use differential privacy?
I don't know why you understood my comment as saying government shouldn't have any data. I specifically replied to the comment about religion - there's no reason for the government to collect any data about that from individuals. Churches can report how many members they have if they want to. But it shouldn't be a question on the census.
That's where you hope people like Rene Carmille are around. S
Asking about your religion on the census is against the law in the US:
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...
> compelled
Doesn't that mean they can ask that question with an option for "rather not disclose"?
You can look at the sample form for 2020 census and you will find it is not on there.
Religion is just an example. Don't dwell on it.
France used to make plenty of lists. We loved lists. Lists are good. Jews lists? Sure, it's maybe useful one day when we want to do something.
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
"What is your religious affiliation" makes absolutely no sense in a census exercise. IMO.
The U.S. Census Bureau collects tons of data unrelated to the decennial counting for Congressional apportionment.
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.
Unless you’re a government explicitly and openly aligned with Christian nationalists.
The point might be going over my head… why does it make no sense?
The United States are listed as a secular state (ie. it "is or purports to be officially neutral in matters of religion")
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...
why it makes sense? please try to answer. what action of the gov would change based on that data?
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.
Isn’t religion, for those who follow it (I don’t), one of if not the most important aspects of their identity and life’s purpose? I love breakfast food, but not that much.
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?
They are asking what policy decisions hinge on that religion question. Given 1st amendment protections against government policy that favors one religion over another, I think that’s a fair question to ask.
It actually does. Religious affinity can absolutely be useful for longer trend studies, and census data is usually of much, much higher quality than other random sample studies.
With that perspective, how do you prevent scope creep when preparing a census exercise? You would collect everything and the shape of each house's kitchen sink, because "it can be useful".