Old Protestant Denominations

Let’s try to move chronologically as best we can. I’ve discussed the various Reformation churches in my previous post. But let’s move forward from there: who comes next?

Well, it’s got to be the Congregationalists. Arguably, I should have included Congregationalism in my estimate of Reformed churches… but I made a judgement call, and did not. Congregationalism is descended from the Calvinist, Reformed tradition, but is more defined by its organization (loosely independent congregations) than its theological distinctives. Historically, it was big in Scotland and New England. So where is Congregationalism big?

Congregationalist churches turn out to have a neat geography. There are basically three main clusters. The first is the old New England congregationalist establishment, which stops dead at the New York border, except way north in New York where Vermonters broke through and settled the western fringes of the Empire state. Then we get the midwest cluster, from Pennsylvania to eastern Washington, reflecting migration out of New England, the absorption of some German pietist denominations, and Americanization of immigrants, as well as missionary efforts in the region. The third group is what we might call Scottish or Scots-Irish congregationalism, which you can see in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and North Georgia. Altogether, Congregationalism can count a bit under 500,000 church attendees… meaning the ancient faith of New England has fewer adherents than Islam, Mormonism, or Buddhism.

The next set of movements are arguably the Pietists and Methodists. We’ll start with the Pietist churches descended from the European free church movement. But crucially, I am excluding explicitly Anabaptist churches. To see the full heritage of Pietism, you’d need to include most of the Anabaptist and Moravian communities as well. Pietism was defined by a desire to reinvigorate staid European churches with genuine piety; they were seen as washed out, corrupt, and fixated on ritual. Pietists called for a new commitment to personal piety and a radical simplification of worship.

This map has a lot of overlap with Lutheranism and with Anabaptists, because Pietism largely sprang out of Lutheran and Anabaptist movements. I’ll admit I was actually very surprised by how big the Pietist population turns out to be: nearly 800,000 parishioners, so comparable to Anglicanism. I really thought Pietism was a much smaller movement. But with a handful of good-sized denominations descended from dissenting movements in European churches, they end up pretty well-represented, especially in the Midwest.

Next, we’ll jump to our first historically black denominations, historically black Methodists! Methodists inherited much of the Pietist tradition, though were not directly associated with Continental Pietism, even though their complaints with the Church of England, which they broke from, were very similar to formal Pietist complaints with Lutheran and Reformed churches.

Surprise surprise, these denominations are most prevalent in the former cotton- and rice-growing regions of the south. Now, I should make a note here about data. Some denominations in this project report attendance. Some report attendance for only some churches. Some report adherency, but not attendance. Some don’t even report adherency, just county-number of congregations. When data is missing, I impute it: I find demographically similar denominations that have complete data, and impute attendees from published adherency or congregational density. This means many of my estimates really are just that, “estimates.” In most cases, my methods should be uncontroversial. But for historically black churches, my method is sort of a gauntlet thrown down. Historically black churches egregiously overstate their membership. This shows up in direct surveys of individuals, but it really shows up in the religion census data, because in each of my three denominations in this specific sample, some churches report attendance, some do not, but all report adherency. Let’s take the African Methodist Episcopal church as an example, as it claims to be the largest of the three, with 1 million adherents. Restricting to churches that also report their attendees, it falls to 832,000. For that 832,000, there are 234,000 attendees, for a roughly 28% attendance rate. This is way on the low end: most denominations have attendance rates of 30% or higher, and many reach into the 50% or 60%. In other words, the historically black churches keep members on the rolls long after they’ve stopped attending, a trait shared with some Mainline churches like the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. All totaled up, I estimate there are under 400,000 regular attendees of Historically Black Methodist churches in America.

But what about “historically white” Methodists? (Sidenote: it’s icky to me that these race categories are still a thing. Can’t we find some way to have racial union?)

Okay, now that’s a big crowd! It’s hard to describe any single region as a Methodist stronghold other than perhaps the Great Plains, but there are many sporadic regions of strength. Methodists seem to have most dominant presence in the Great Plains, the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake, northern and eastern Appalachia, and parts of the cotton belt. But what’s most interesting to me are the places where Methodism is not strong: the most mountainous interior of Appalachia, the swathe from Missouri to Okalahoma, New England, Louisiana, and, of course, anything west of the Rockies. Apparently Methodism doesn’t do well with mountains.

I don’t have a good explanation for these trends… but I would suggest that if you want to a prominent denominational family that roughly-equally typifies all of middle America with minimal ethnic baggage and a theology clearly compatible with mainstream American ideology, well, you can’t do much better than Methodism. That is to say, I suspect a fair amount of what we’re seeing here is that traditional American values just jive really well with Methodist theology, which is why Methodism is one of the largest denominational families in America, with 3.2 million regular worshipers, alongside of course the 400,000 in the historically black denominations.

So who comes after the Methodists and Pietists? Why, the Baptists, of course! Baptists mostly originated from the Church of England as well, although they were influenced by Reformed and Anabaptist theologies as well. Today, Baptists are the best-known denomination which simultaneously rejects infant baptism, holds a symbolic view of the sacraments, and confesses a Calvinist theory of human will and the Atonement. We’ll start with everybody’s favorite behemoth of Protestantism…

This map is striking. I considered setting a higher threshold, but I used the 5% threshold for Lutheranism too when it had a similar pattern of regional dominance and concentration. What is most striking to me is how incredibly powerful state lines are: Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Texas, and West Virginia all show up strongly. Confederate-sympathizing southern Illinois shows up too.

It’s no secret what the source of this division is: the Civil War. Areas that seceded or were sympathetic to secession broke away and formed the Southern Baptist Conference. There have been some realignments since then, and Southern Baptists have filtered west, but it’s actually striking how little Southern Baptists have been able to extend their geographic territory since 1860, even juuuust over the border into Iowa or Kansas.

Pivoting a bit, we can look at the flip-side of Baptist religious life and the civil war, and see historically black Baptist religiosity:

And it turns out… it’s pretty low, and concentrated in the south and a few northern cities, with a smattering on the west coast. I’m able to identify just a little over 400,000 attendees of historically black baptist churches, so comparable to the historically black Methodist churches. For reference, the denomination-level statements of the 4 denominations indicate membership of 9–14 million people, though it turns out adding up individual churches only yields about 2.5–3 million members, suggesting that the denominational higher-ups are defining adherency very differently than local churches do.

Finally, we can cover aaaaalll the other baptists: regular, old regular, general, northern, American, etc.

These groups could be called the “distinctive religion” of West Virginia, Arkansas, and southern Indiana. Of the 1 million “other baptists,” about 750,000 are “American Baptist,” that is, the denomination of baptists that sided with the Union, not the Confederacy. About 100,000 of these attendees are in what might be called “traditionalist” or “primitivist” denominations, which espouse radical simplicity in worship and are even more fiercely opposed to social change than the Southern Baptist Conference. But take note: West Virginia’s “other baptists” prominence is due almost entirely to an elevated “American Baptist” presence due to West Virginia’s founding Unionism, while radical traditionalist baptists are not much more prominent in West Virginia than anywhere else.

Whew. Okay. We did Congregationalists, Pietists, Methodists, and Baptists. That covered a lot of ground. Let’s move on now… to the Second Great Awakening.