Origins: Taking Count

Every ten years there’s a rumbling in Washington. The machinery of government begins to churn, and soon people with notebooks are scurrying about everywhere, trying to take a reckoning of the American body politic.

This familiar civic ritual, the census, has a distinguished lineage, one that goes back at least to ancient Rome. According to the Gospel of Luke, it was even a Roman census that was responsible for Jesus’ being born in Bethlehem:

“In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be enrolled. This was the first enrollment, when Quirinius was governor of Syria. And all went to be enrolled, each to his own city. And Joseph also went from Galilee, from the town of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be enrolled with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. And while they were there, the time came for her to be delivered. And she gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn” (Luke 2:1–7).