This is the echo chamber of public-opinion polling: People are asked about their perceptions of others’ beliefs, but those perceptions are likely shaped by what they’ve read and heard about poll results, at least in part. Polls aim to show how people think about the world, but the tool is inherently distorted, attempting to simultaneously feed and record public opinion. If polls were just neutral instruments of truth-telling, maybe this wouldn’t matter, but they can also be an incredible source of tangible power.

There is no sphere of life that polling hasn’t touched. The language of data is ubiquitous: X percent of Americans think this, Y percent identify as that. Even when they don’t actually say much, numbers carry a sheen of authority, which is part of why polling has become the unquestioned tool of choice for establishing Truth in the public sphere.

Not all statistics are created equal, of course. Many rely on tiny samples or skewed audiences or biased responses, or are produced by firms with a vested interest in reaching a certain conclusion. These biases can be hard to detect, or too much trouble to decode; and when statistics are reported in the media, they are often embraced with a misguided deference to factiness.

Bad stats are easy targets, though. Setting these aside, it’s much more difficult to wage a sustained critique of polling. Enter Robert Wuthnow, a Princeton professor whose new book, Inventing American Religion, takes on the entire industry with the kind of telegraphed crankiness only academics can achieve. He argues that even gold-standard contemporary polling relies on flawed methodologies and biased questions. Polls about religion claim to show what Americans believe as a society, but actually, Wuthnow says, they say very little.

In its worst form, this kind of critique can be self-indulgent, overly academic, and boring. It’s a micro-polemic: a big, philosophical attack on a topic that’s fairly narrow and small. Wuthnow’s critique, though, is ultimately concerned with how people derive knowledge about themselves, which is important. It speaks to the most basic project of public life: people collectively trying to figure themselves out, trading observations about the nature of existence as they all march steadily toward death.

Polls about religion impose neatness on this messy struggle with existence. They rely on tidy categories, marking points to help people see how others are like or unlike themselves. So if, as Wuthnow says, even the best polls are not that good, and they don’t tell us much, it’s worth considering: What fictions about belief get propagated when statistics are used for self-understanding?

For all its prominence today, modern American religion polling actually has a fairly short history. Wuthnow begins his narrative near the turn of the 20th century, when, “as near as anyone could tell,” he writes, “religion’s influence was declining.” For decades, the U.S. Census Bureau had been tracking data about religious groups; major denominations also tracked their membership and participation. But as the surge of church planting on the American frontier drew to a close, immigrants flooded the country, and religious communities across the country saw declining attendance, clergy faced a new challenge: getting people back into church. To figure this out, sociologists started conducting neighborhood surveys, sending volunteers from house to house with questionnaires. These investigations were also sometimes part of larger attempts to understand urban communities. W.E.B. Du Bois, for example, included interviews with clergy in a massive 1899 study about communal life in Philadelphia.

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