Contextualizing the Religious Survey

Censuses and surveys represent a two-edged sword. They are both a technology of governance for national and former colonial administrations and a tool of recognition for the minoritized. In this article, I discuss the history of censuses and surveys in a Danish context, arguing that the regional and local history of registration is crucial for understanding how and why religious identity becomes visible and important as a measure for the population. Applying the case of a national survey on religiosity in relation to the Danish Evangelical Lutheran Church in 2020, I ask how religion comes alive through the strategic use of artificial ideal types aimed at mapping a religious mainstream. Surveys introduce a distance to messy religious reality, thereby reducing complexity and richness. Yet this distance also allows the researcher to ask new questions that go beyond the immediate religious experience.