An Organizational Classification of Protestant Denominations

While Protestant religious groups are self-classifying with regard to centralization of authority (polity), this dimension has been largely ignored in research on Protestants, in part due to the lack of an easily accessible scale. An attempt is made in this paper to derive such a classification, wor...

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Auteur principal: Sullins, D. Paul (Auteur)
Type de support: Électronique Article
Langue:Anglais
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Publié: Springer 2004
Dans: Review of religious research
Année: 2004, Volume: 45, Numéro: 3, Pages: 278-292
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Résumé:While Protestant religious groups are self-classifying with regard to centralization of authority (polity), this dimension has been largely ignored in research on Protestants, in part due to the lack of an easily accessible scale. An attempt is made in this paper to derive such a classification, working from the hypothesis, following Takayama and Cannon (1979), that polity and structural characteristics independently predict centralization of authority. Using organizational indicators reported by the World Christian Encyclopedia--age of denomination, number of members, and number of congregations--discriminant and latent class analyses are used to derive a trichotomous ordinal scale of 214 denominations by centralization of authority: from "Decentralized" to "Moderate" to "Most Centralized". Construct validation demonstrates that the religious centralization scale replicates and extends a previous narrower measure of polity (Wood 1970). A comparison of the effects of religious centralization and fundamentalism on 13 common religious indicators on the General Social Survey illustrates the importance of religious centralization for understanding the belief and behavior of American Protestants.
ISSN:2211-4866
Contient:Enthalten in: Review of religious research
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.2307/3512265