Background

RELTRAD is the most popular and widely used classification scheme for sorting religious traditions in the social sciences, however it struggles with how to sort non-denominational Protestants into one of the existing categories, with a growing number falling into an often ignored “unclassified” category.

Purpose

To demonstrate the growing problem of excluding non-denominational protestants who attend infrequently in the current iteration of RELTRAD. We assess the assumption that the “unclassified” respondents are akin to those who select a “don’t know” option and should be excluded. We also propose several ways to reintroduce low attending non-denominationals back into the larger sample.

Methods

As a means to assess the political and religious characteristics of these “unclassified” respondents, we compare non-denominationals to a prototypical evangelical denomination—the Southern Baptist Convention and a prototypical mainline denomination—the United Methodist Church using General Social Survey data from 2000 to 2018. We also re-run models of social and political phenomena, originally shown by Steensland et al. (Soc Forces 79:291, 2000), with the new and old RELTRAD categories.

Results

Analyses indicate that non-denominational Protestants who attend church at least once a month have similar characteristics to evangelicals, justifying their current classification. However, non-denominationals who attend less frequently are more difficult to sort cleanly as they are more conservative than United Methodists but more liberal than Southern Baptists. However, the gaps caused by attendance among the three groups is comparable, undermining the RELTRAD assumption that low attending non-denominationals should be excluded from the sample.

Conclusions and Implications

We reject the decision to exclude low attending non-denominationals from samples. Combined with other analyses of non-denominational Christians that show differences by denominationalism, we conclude that the best way forward may be creating an entirely new RELTRAD category for non-denominational Protestants that would solve the problem of the unclassifieds and not lose measure specificity. This choice brings new questions into focus as researchers can acknowledge the rapidly growing non-denominational category and assess the degrees of overlap and distinction with traditional religious families in the United States.

中文翻译：

---

跌破裂缝：处理RELTRAD中的未分类问题

背景

RELTRAD是在社会科学中用于对宗教传统进行分类的最流行且使用最广泛的分类方案，但是它在如何将非宗派新教徒分类为现有分类之一方面遇到了麻烦，越来越多的分类落入经常被忽略的“未分类”分类中。

目的

为了说明日益严重的问题，即排除不经常参加RELTAR迭代的非教派新教徒。我们评估的假设是，“未分类”的受访者类似于那些选择“不知道”选项的受访者，因此应排除在外。我们还提出了几种将低参与度非教派重新引入较大样本的方法。

方法

为了评估这些“未分类”受访者的政治和宗教特征，我们使用2000年至2006年的一般社会调查数据，将非宗派与典型的福音派-南方浸信会和典型的主教派-美国卫理公会进行了比较。 2018年。我们还重新运行了最初由Steensland等人展示的社会和政治现象模型。（Soc Forces 79：291，2000），分为新旧RELTRAD类别。

结果

分析表明，每月至少参加一次教堂的非教派新教徒具有与福音派教徒相似的特征，这证明了他们目前的分类。但是，参加频率较低的非教派成员比联合卫理公会派保守得多，但比南方浸信会派更加自由，因此很难进行清晰的分类。但是，三组出席者之间的差距是可比的，这破坏了RELTRAD的假设，即应从样本中排除低出席率的非教派。

结论与启示

我们拒绝从样本中排除出席人数较少的非教派的决定。结合其他通过宗派主义表现出差异的非宗派基督徒的分析，我们得出结论，最好的方法可能是为非宗派新教徒创建一个全新的RELTRAD类别，该类别将解决未分类的问题，而不会失去度量特异性。当研究人员可以认识到快速增长的非教派类别并评估与美国传统宗教家庭的重叠程度和区别程度时，这一选择便引起了新的问题。