Constructing empirical indicators of religious differentiation within total national populations is no task either for perfectionists or scholars with a low tolerance for ambiguity. Understandably, most cliometritians have sought to gratify their desires for descriptive clarity by focusing on historical phenomena (demographic, economic, political) for which reasonably reliable and broadly representative evidence exists in the archives of nation-states with rather long histories of bureaucratic record-keeping. Where religious pluralism obtained, as in Britain, Holland, and Switzerland, such diversity had a chance of being officially relevant and thereby recorded. Currie, Gilbert, and Horsley have availed themselves of that potential in their impressive quantitative studies of church growth in Britain since 1700. In Norway, until after 1845, collective deviations from legally permissible conduct, as in the case of the Hauge and Thrane movements, were most systematically described by investigative agencies that contribute to their repression.

My effort in this chapter to estimate the magnitude and regional distribution of organized lay activism within Norwegian society by 1891 (except for the Dissenter Census of that year) is necessarily based on less systematic sources of evidence. Among these, as we shall see, by far the most useful and important is Ola Rudvin's two-volume history of the Inner-Mission Society, published on the occasion of its one-hundredth anniversary. John Nome's comparable study of the outer-mission society's first hundred years is of more restricted utility for present purposes.