I was listening to a recent podcast of Catholic Answers Live, and the guest mentioned more than once the “over 30,000 Protestant denominations” in the world today. I won’t name the guest here, since I think his/her identity is not germane to the issue I want to raise, which is: On what basis do Catholic apologists cite this figure? The particular expert guesting on this episode is by no means the only one mentioning this sort of largish number. I’ve heard several Catholic Answers apologists each give a similar figure, which invariably is in the thousands or tens of thousands. I’m usually bothered when I hear this statistic alleged, since I don’t think such great numbers square with my understanding of Protestantism. So, I’ve gathered the impetus to do some research and try to get to the truth. I now share with you my findings.

I began with the obvious Google search for “thousands protestant denominations”. I clicked on several of the top ten hits.

Let’s begin with “The Lie of 30000 Protestant Denominations”. This site merely distills some conclusions from a couple of articles written by Eric Svendsen, so let’s just click through to Svendsen’s pieces.

Eric Svendsen argues “no” “30,000 Protestant Denominations?” is the original article, which Svendsen says is an excerpt from a book of his. Here, Svendsen claims that all the Catholic apologists whom he has directly confronted regarding this statistic could not cite a specific source, other than to say they heard it from some other Catholic apologist.

He then asserts that all Catholic citations can eventually be traced to David A. Barrett’s World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World (1982). Svendsen proceeds to dismantle the 20,000+ figure as follows: Barrett counts 20,780 denominations as of 1980, but in fact only 8,196 of these are grouped together as Protestant. He then tries to defuse the 8,196 figure by saying:

Yet even this figure is misleading; for it is clear that Barrett defines “distinct denominations” as any group that might have a slightly different emphasis than another group (such as the difference between a Baptist church that emphasizes hymns, and another Baptist church that emphasizes praise music).

He also points out that Barrett’s definitions and distinctions yield 2,942 Catholic denominations. Svendsen then proceeds to seal his argument by stating that Barrett makes further distinction

on the basis of jurisdiction, rather than differing beliefs and practices

or by geography, if you will.

Svendsen then draws a new picture of just how the denomination pie is to be sliced by appealing to Barrett’s higher-level grouping of “blocs”. From this, we are to conclude that, among the 92 traditions of Christianity (and Christian hybrid religions) which one can discern as subgroups of these blocs, 21 are Protestant, while 16 are Catholic. 21 Protestant denominations, but 16 Catholic He labels these 92 as “true” denominations, insofar as the division more closely depicts what he believes a denomination is.

Svendsen has also written “30,000 Protestant Denominations — Revisited”, but that article seems to be mostly an attack on the integrity and apologetic technique of a certain Mario Derksen of Catholic Insight (whose website was down at the time of this writing). It is a rebuttle of an article which Mario Derksen wrote (which I was unable to find via web search). Overall, I don’t think it’s worth discussing here, but you can go read it yourself if you wish.

Thus far, I would be inclined to concur with Svendsen’s points and argument. We should concern ourselves with significant doctrinal differences when trying to delineate Christian denominations (or “groups”, or whatever apellation you wish to employ). But, as good seekers of truth, let us move on to consider additional viewpoints and arguments.

The only other search hit of significance in the first three search result pages is “How Many Protestant Denominations Are There?”. This page contains some brief writings by people from the Catholic Answers forums.

Here, the “author” (Dave1988) attempts to maintain that we can still assert a figure of 20,000 or more denominations, and that the definition of denomination used for such a count is David Barrett’s own:

an organized Christian Church or tradition or religious group or community of believers or aggregate of worship centers or congregations, usually within a specific country, whose component congregations and members are called by the same name in different areas, regarding themselves as an autonomous Christian church distinct from other denominations, churches and traditions.

Dave moves on to try to find evidence for the assertion that Barrett numbers Roman Catholic denominations in the world at over 200. Dave admits that Barrett’s World Christian Encyclopedia (2001 edition) does indeed state a value of 242, but upon closer inspection, it turns out that Barrett is counting each country’s Catholic establishment as a denomination. (There are 238 countries covered.) He further points out that, of all the countries he examined, including the United States and Great Britain, none of them had more than a single, solitary Roman Catholic denomination listed.

Dave1988 then pulls some figures from World Christian Encyclopedia. In the United States, Barrett counts 6,222 denominations. We are told by the article that Barrett breaks down the denominations into at least these groups: Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Anglican, Independent, and Marginal. Dave1988 tries to paint a certain picture by reorganizing the breakdown into only Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant (i.e. “Protestant” is “everyone else”). Under this assumption, the math works out to: 1 Catholic denomination, 60 Orthodox, and a whopping 6222 - ( 60 + 1 ) = 6161 Protestant denominations in the U.S. He then softens things by showing Barrett’s breakdown of this lumped-together Protestant category: Protestant: 660; Anglican: 1; Independent: 5,100; Marginal: 400. He maintains that a ratio of 1:660 is still significant. 1 Catholic denomination, 660 Protestant

The article shifts gears a bit and asks us to consider what things look like when we use a different definition of denomination, namely one from [a certain edition of] Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary which considers a denomination to be

a religious organization uniting local congregations in a single legal and administrative body

Dave1988 contrasts the Catholic Church with the Baptist denominational grouping. He says that all of the so-called denominations of Barrett which fall under Barrett’s Catholic bloc and traditions would all be considered belonging to one Merriam-Webster denomination. However, every local Baptist parish church is a law unto itself, says Dave1988, quoting from Leo Rosten’s Religions of America. As such, each individual Baptist church is a Merriam-Webster denomination unto itself. The implication is that there is therefore a countless myriad of Baptist denominations.

I follow Dave1988’s line of reasoning, but I don’t think it is a fully charitable treatment of the issue.

To be more thorough, let’s consider another Google search: “how many denominations”.

The top hit gives a blog post which contains nothing but a link to another [blog's] blog post. Clicking through, we read a treatment which regurgitates Svendsen’s article (mentioned earlier), but also tries to declare large numbers absurd purely by virtue of considering ratios of persons to denominations. Clearly, the author has a more general and encompassing definition of denomination in mind.

The remaining hits on the first Google results page mostly deal with the issue of whether the existence of many denominations (or denominations, period) is a bad thing or not. While I think this issue is important, I do not wish to address it in this post.

So what do I conclude from this excursion into the web?

It is clear that the number of denominations of Christianity one arrives at hinges largely on the definition of “denomination” used. This number can range from fewer than 100 to more than 30,000. I still think that there is a certain cognitive dissonance that arises when one hears such startling figures as Protestant denominations numbering in the tens of thousands. I assume that most people think of large, inclusive groupings when they are asked to divide Christianity into denominations, and, as such, they probably don’t imagine anything more than several dozen of these large groupings. So, in this matter, I think I will side with my Protestant bretheren by saying that citing figures in the tens of thousands for the number of denominations would not be a charitable way to describe the situation, even though it is possible to argue that this is true. If ever I were asked to give a figure myself, I would probably go with a “larger” definition of denomination, and say: 30-something. 30-something Protestant denominations