The U.S. Religions Census, conducted every 10 years by a consortium of researchers, is generally considered one of the best measures of religious affiliation and diversity in the United States.
Politicians consult it to keep informed about spiritual life in their towns, parishes, districts or states. Church leaders await its findings to keep up with changes in the number of adherents for various faiths. And academics study it, hoping for a glimpse of how the religious currents are shifting across the country.
The latest Religions Census, released in June, shows the Catholic Church remains far and away the largest religious group in the state, with approximately 3.2 million members.
While the Jewish and Protestant faith remain among the largest in the state, the number of Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Mormon houses of worship and their membership appear to be growing quickly.
And it shows that New Jersey is one of the most religiously diverse states in the country with more than 230 denominations listed as having a presence here.
But this survey is more interesting for what it doesn’t say, and in the opinion of many experts and religious leaders, it proves one enduring truth:
It is next to impossible to put religion into numbers.
And the vast diversity of faiths in New Jersey is one reason.
Consider some of the challenges:
• Each religious group has a different way of counting its congregants, making comparison difficult.
• Many congregations are not counted completely or at all, some choosing to stay quiet for fear of persecution, while others are simply too small or new to appear on researchers’ radar.
• And perhaps most importantly, religious faith is ultimately a deeply personal affair.
“I think the bottom line here is that these types of surveys provide helpful but limited data,” said Joseph Williams, a religion professor at Rutgers University. “They may capture broad trends and especially help identify the growth of particular traditions, but two individuals who identify as Catholic may have very, very different ideas about what that label means and why they identify with it.”
Experts say this is especially true in New Jersey, where religion often hides in plain sight.
There is the mosque where Muslims come to worship in the back of a strip mall. Church sermons are being delivered in bars and hotels. In the shadow of Route 9, a small home has been converted into a tiny Buddhist temple.
“There is amazing religious diversity here, but it’s a very fluid and dynamic thing,” said Laurel Kearns, an associate professor of sociology and religion at Drew University.
“Survey data isn’t going to capture all of the nuance that exists. Even within the same religion, you have very different flavors, very different ways of interpreting the same thing.”
Edward DaCunha spends much of his time immersed in numbers.
DaCunha, an auxiliary bishop with the Archdiocese of Newark, studies demographic changes within parishes for the Catholic Church.
As New Jersey changes, it’s become an increasingly important part of the church’s mission.
“We are constantly monitoring not only demographic shifts but also the viability of parishes as the Catholic population grows or declines in different areas,” he said. “This area has always had a large immigrant population, but today, we’re seeing an influx of Catholics from all over the world, from South America, Asia and Africa.”
Where three decades ago Sunday Mass would primarily be given in English, now it’s not uncommon for sermons to be delivered in Portuguese, Spanish or Korean.
“There are Masses given in 20 languages in the diocese every weekend,” DaCunha said.
Demographic studies, both internal and external, have become increasingly important for religious groups, particularly in areas like New Jersey where population shifts can be dramatic from decade to decade.
“It can be very helpful in identifying broad trends,” Williams said. The U.S. Religions Census, while incomplete, shows that faiths can see swings in membership that number in the thousands in a 10-year span.
The data show from 2000 to 2010, many well-established Christian faiths, including Catholic, Episcopal, Lutheran and Methodist, lost congregations and members, a sign Kearns said may be linked to people shifting away from traditional houses of worship.
“We have these much more localized, nuanced understandings of what that religion means to people,” she said. “We do know there is a shift away from that idea of a central authority.”
The survey also identified scores of Hindu temples and Muslim mosques in the Garden State, likely representative of the influx of immigrants New Jersey has seen in recent years coming from southern Asia and the Middle East. Other Christian faiths, like Southern Baptist and Pentecostal, also appear to be increasing their presence in the New Jersey, the data shows.
But while the Religions Census is one of the more thorough measures of faith in the nation, it is also limited to what researchers can unearth in each county in the country.
The decennial survey is conducted by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, a consortium of researchers and religious officials from around the country who collect data on religious groups through a variety of means, from obtaining church mailing lists to scouring the internet for lists of mosques.
Some groups, in particular black Christian churches in the South, do not keep extensive data on their memberships. Other groups, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, have in the past declined to participate altogether, though they provided their mailing lists in 2010.
The state’s Jewish population had its estimated membership more than halved in the 2010 Census from 468,000 in 2000 to a little more than 200,000 in 2010 — meaning it was likely vastly undercounted.
The Religions Census also does not do a good job of accounting for how devout a religion’s membership is.
“A straightforward census gives little sense for the level of commitment involved, and it is much better at capturing institutionalized forms of religious expression as opposed to highly individualized forms of religious expressions that defy easy categorization,” Kearns said.
Kearns said many groups, especially new immigrants, would go out of their way to not be counted.
“Many religious groups really try to stay under the radar,” Kearns said. “If you know your new host country doesn’t exactly approve of your religion, are you going to answer some stranger’s questions about it? I don’t think so. As a result, we miss a whole strata where perhaps we have some of the most amazing religious diversity.”
The building at 3 Speedwell Ave. in Morristown reads Hyatt Hotel, but on Sundays, it’s a house of worship.
For the past five years, Liquid Church, a non-denominational Christian ministry, has met its growing membership at hotels around New Jersey. It began when Pastor Tim Lucas, a Cedar Grove native, and his wife moved to New Jersey after attending college in Chicago in the late 1990s and couldn’t find a church that catered to young Christians.
“Liquid is a church for people looking for something more accessible than traditional institutions,” Lucas said. “We talk about the Bible, but we talk about it as it pertains to contemporary issues facing Christians.”
Liquid Church now has 3,000 members and webcasts their sermons, drawing people across the country and from as far away as Iraq, according to Lucas.
“I’m seeing a lot of these small churches springing up and growing up. Although they’re smaller, they often have a lot more momentum than some of the mainstream institutions,” Lucas said.
Liquid Church was not counted by the U.S. Religions Census. It’s one of scores of active religious groups across the Garden State that exist in dark spots rarely illuminated by surveys.
“I visited a mosque recently and when I showed up at the address I couldn’t find it,” Kearns said. “I kept driving back and forth, and all I could see was this strip mall. It wasn’t until my husband looked it up on Google. He said, ‘You might want to try driving around the back.’ Sure enough, past the loading docks was this little mosque. You would never, never find it.”
What’s more, the definition of religion varies from person to person, and, as people move away from centralized institutions, a patchwork of various faiths can emerge. Additionally, more and more people consider themselves more spiritual than traditionally religious and therefore may not show up in any survey, according to Kearns.
“People have their own beliefs and in the United States we’re sort of trained as consumers to have a lot of choices,” Lucas said. “I see a lot of salad bar spirituality. People take a little bit of Christianity, and sprinkle on some Buddhism or Hinduism, maybe add some Islam, and sort of create their own salad.”
Prashant Joshi had to chuckle.
Joshi and his wife, Manju, teach yoga, the highly popularized fitness and meditation exercise rooted in Hindu philosophy, at Gurukul Holistic Center in Bridgewater. One afternoon, he struck up a conversation with a Catholic at a local pharmacy.
“Oh, I can’t do yoga because I’m Catholic,” the man told him.
For Joshi, it underscored the challenges new and growing religions face in New Jersey.
“Of course, I laugh, but people misunderstand so much. With people’s ignorance, challenges come,” Joshi said. “As we get more diverse, we need to build bridges between one another. If you have these preconceived notions of a group or a person, you begin building an island for yourself. We need to build these bridges so new generations wipe hatred from their vocabulary.”
Joshi attends the Sri Venkateswara Temple, a Hindu house of worship that has had a presence in the town for more than two decades. Swatantra Murthy, a board member at the temple who has lived in New Jersey for more than 40 years, said while acceptance of various faiths has improved as the state becomes more diverse, challenges remain.
“When we moved here, we lived in Parsippany. We went through a lot there — broken windows, vandalism,” she said. “People have a lot of preconceived notions about Hinduism. They see the temple and think they can’t go in there, but we open our temple up to everybody. I bring people from my senior center here — they love it.”
Gurparkash Singh knows that ignorance can be a dangerous thing.
The Basking Ridge resident is a Sikh, a group that, like Muslims, has become a chief target of hate crimes since Sept. 11. It’s been a struggle for Sikhs and Muslims alike to disassociate themselves from the Islamic extremists who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks.
The Sikhs also suffer from an identity crisis — many people consider them Muslims because the men typically wear turbans and have long beards, but they are not of the Islamic faith. This has forced Sikhs to take action on two fronts, rallying against bullying and violence against their community while also educating the rest of the American populous about who they are.
“We are particularly concerned about our kids who have been taunted and subjected to humiliation in our schools. These incidents have been happening with more frequency,” Singh said. “We’re trying to reach out to folks and help them understand who we are. We’re extending our hands to anyone who is willing to shake them.”
He said there is no question that the Garden State is a melting pot, but more needs to be done to ensure the pot’s contents actually melt together.
“We are trying to raise our children to not only be good Sikhs but good Americans,” he said. “If we are able to educate the younger generation, they are going to lead us tomorrow.”
“The word ‘community’ is so important,” he said. “We have to continue with a holistic education. Violence comes to the mind with ignorance, but when you start on the right footing, you give the prejudice a backseat. When prejudice takes a backseat, life is beautiful.”