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...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Sage Publications
2004
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| In: |
Review of religious research
Year: 2004, Volume: 45, Issue: 3, Pages: 278-292 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | 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. |
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| ISSN: | 2211-4866 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Review of religious research
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.2307/3512265 |