Last month, the Pew Research Center issued an innovative analysis of 49,719  sermons delivered between last April 7 and June 1 in 6,431 U.S. congregations that were posted online. This report made a bit of news and is worth perusing if you missed it (click here).

 This Guy Memo recommends to fellow writers that a useful appendix to that document (click here for .pdf) deserves more than a glance. It details Pew’s standard system for “classifying congregations by religious tradition,” with 244 specific identities cited in interviewing, grouped into 19 categories.

Pew makes a major contribution to analysis of American religion with its frequent polling practice of pushing to get respondents'  specific identities and affiliations beyond the usually unhelpful “Protestant” vs. “Catholic” approach of old-fashioned polling.

What kind of Protestant?

For that matter, what kind of, say, Presbyterian (tmatt shows a blitz of options here)?

Are you an active or nominal churchgoer?

With the media frenzy over religion and politics, polls nowadays at least usually ask Protestants whether they self-identify as “evangelical” or not, whatever that word means.

When Pew asks poll respondents about the specific congregation they affiliate with, it then helpfully lumps the Protestants into the three main categories of “Evangelical,” “Mainline” and “Historically Black.” These three groups are distinct not only on religion but in social and political terms. Writers are likely to be less perplexed by Pew’s other categories of Catholic, Orthodox Christian, “other Christian,”  “Mormon” (there’s that controversial word again!), Jehovah’s Witness, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, “other faiths,” "miscellaneous" and “unclassifiable.”   

The following examples from Pew’s Protestant taxonomy will indicate some of the difficulties with America’s astonishing religious variety, particularly for those new to religion writing. Due to such complexity, The Guy recommends that newsrooms keep handy a copy of J. Gordon Melton’s super-comprehensive “Encyclopedia of American Religions,” with well over 2,000 listings.

Pew correctly puts the large “Evangelical Lutheran Church in America” in the “mainline” ranks, which means that it is not considered “evangelical” despite its official name!

How come? With the Lutherans’ European forebears, “evangelical” is often a synonym for “Protestant,” and the ELCA was formed in a three-way merger where one uniting denomination was named “Evangelical.” 

Some groups fit two categories. Pew accurately lists the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches as (of course) Baptist. But it is equally a classic example of the “Fundamentalist” camp due to a creed that requires Bible “inerrancy,” creationism and ”obedience to the biblical commands to separate ourselves unto God from worldliness and ecclesiastical apostasy.”

The Free Methodist Church of North America could be classified as (yes)  Methodist, but Pew accurately puts it into the “Holiness” church list along with e.g. the Church of the Nazarene, Salvation Army and Wesleyan Church. The Holiness churches are a conservative stream out of the Methodist-Wesleyan-Arminian  heritage but distinct from the 50 Pentecostal groups Pew lists, which  often share “holiness” aspects, e.g. the International Pentecostal Holiness Church.)

A case can be made for Pew counting  the Christian and Missionary Alliance as another “Holiness” group, but The Guy would put it under “Evangelical Miscellaneous” along with e.g. the Evangelical Covenant Church and Evangelical Free Church. Confusingly, Pew puts the Christadelphians here and yet more accurately says they belong with “other faiths,” presumably because the group does not accept the orthodox doctrine of God as the Trinity (nor do “Oneness” Pentecostal churches that Pew debatably calls “evangelical”).

Technical corrections: With the 22 groups under “Presbyterian/Reformed,” Pew should add “ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians,” the third and most recent (2012) conservative split of 380 congregations that left  the Presbyterian Church (USA). Also, the correct name for a denomination dating from 1782 is “Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church,” not “Association.”  

The  U.S. government’s Census such as the one now occurring does not ask about religious affiliation, so the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies (ASARB) conducts its own decennial U.S. Religion Census. The full report will go on sale in 2022.

A (paywalled) article by Christianity Today News Editor Daniel Silliman details the challenges, including the tendency of congregations to drop denominational labels and the fact that some have two affiliations. The most maddening challenge is the profusion of independent congregations that lack broader affiliations. 

ASARB hopes to improve the count of independents for its new census by having a team carefully scour every imaginable resource and then checking to delete duplications. The 2010 Religion Census figured there were 35,496 independent and unaffiliated congregations, similar to the total in the nation’s largest denominations and that was no doubt an undercount. Over-all, the 2010 survey (.pdf document here) tabulated 236 groups with 344,894 local congregations and 150,686,156 regularly involved members.  

Another ASARB project replaces the defunct (and more comprehensive) Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches with basic online info on 455 groups.

Be careful out there.