How does the ARDA classify religious groups into categories such as “mainline” or “evangelical”? How should I classify groups that are not included in the ARDAs data?
Classifying denominations can certainly be tricky. We relied on several sources. We began with an article co-authored by Brian Steensland, Jerry Park, Mark Regnerus, Lynn Robinson, Bradford Wilcox, and Robert Woodberry entitled “The Measure of American Religion: Toward Improving the State of the Art,” and published in Social Forces (2000, 79: 291-318). They justified the major categories we used and classified many of the groups in the RCMS collection. When denominations were not included in their classification, we classified the groups based on information given in J. Gordon Melton’s Encyclopedia of American Religions (6th edition) and Frank S. Mead and Samuel S. Hill’s Handbook of Denominations in the United States (10th edition).
