Ruthie << But if you have the time, you might be able to get closer to the actual numbers by getting out your calculator and going for it. I did something like that several years ago, and came up with a number of around 3000 non-Catholic Christian denominations. >>
I’ve done it. No one needs to do anymore work on this ever again:
Facts and Stats on "33000 Denominations"
The Protestant source
World Christian Encyclopedia does indeed refer to “over 33,000 distinct denominations in 238 countries…” (Table 1-5, vol 1, page 16). And when some people see this they think “Protestant” since Orthodox and Catholic are not normally considered “denominations.” Steve Ray and James White broke down the source accurately however: the mega-blocs of “denominations” are as follows (rounding up or down slightly for convenience):
– Independents (about 22000)
– Protestants (about 9000)
– “Marginals” (about 1600)
– Orthodox (781)
– Roman Catholics (242)
– Anglicans (168)
So the 33,000 number is from the total of these 6 mega-blocs:
22000 + 9000 + 1600 + 781 + 242 + 168 = 33,000+
That’s where the 33,000 figure comes from. If you count the “mega-bloc” of “Protestants” only it is 9000 / 33000 or 27% of the total. However, if you combine Protestants with Independents and Anglicans ( [22000 + 9000 + 168] / 33000) it is 94% of the total or 31,000+ . We will
see below that most (about 97%) of the “Independent” churches are indeed Protestants. Now that we have that settled, I will examine what the source says about each of these “mega-blocs.” All of the information below is found on pages 16-18 (volume 1) of the
World Christian Encyclopedia (2001, 2nd edition).
The problem is not the 9000 vs. 33000 figure, but the WAY the source is counting and separating
by country thus generating
DUPLICATES of denoms in many countries. I have already attempted to solve and figure out this problem (something that neither James White, Steve Ray, or Tim Staples has done yet).
This is explicitly stated by the WCE here:
“As a statistical unit in this Encyclopedia, a ‘denomination’ always refers to one single country.
Thus the Roman Catholic Church, although a single organization, is described here as consisting of 236 denominations in the world’s 238 countries.” (Barrett, et al,
World Christian Encyclopedia, volume 1, page 27, in the “Glossary” under definition for “Denomination” [later updated to 242], emphasis added)
As for specific Protestant
non-duplicate (i.e. unique) denominations, you can take the online data available from
"World Christian Database" online, the inheritors and updaters of the same WCE data. They give you 9000+ total Christian denominations to work with: deleting out the “Roman Catholics” “Orthodox” “Marginal” and non-Protestant “Independents” (only 3% of those are non-Protestant, 97% are Protestant) from these you are left with 5000+ total unique Protestant denominations. See this link:
A specific list of 5000+ Protestant denominations
The data for this PHP file was generated from the .csv and .xls data provided by “Global Christianity” / “World Christian Database” online (the zip file has the total 9000+ with the mega-blocs mentioned above, also “non-affiliated” Christians)
DENOMS-BY-NAME.zip
Thank you. The thread can now be closed. The solution to the “33000” enigma has now been solved.
BTW, it is
now 40000+ (Jan 2009) and by 2025 it will be
55000 (with the “counting by country” duplicates problem mentioned earlier).
Phil P
