Are Non-Denominationals Just Evangelicals Without the Institutional Baggage?

A look into demographics, theology, and politics

I am not a religious historian, though there are many excellent ones out there. But here’s one thing that I do know about American Protestant history - denominations have dominated. In any empirical study of American religious history from more than fifty years ago, you'll rarely, if ever, find a category labeled 'non-denominational’.

I recently conducted a quick keyword search for 'nondenominational' in Finke and Stark’s book The Churching of America, which is regarded as a thorough, data-driven exploration of American religious history. The term first appears on page 209 and is only used four times throughout the entire book.

Non-denominational Protestant Christianity is a relatively modern phenomenon. While other scholars are better equipped to delve into the reasons behind its rapid expansion in the United States over the past several decades, what's indisputable is its significant growth and influence in American religious life today.

To illustrate just how much the evangelical landscape has transformed, let's take a closer look at the changes that have occurred over the last forty years.

According to the General Social Survey, in the mid-1980s about 3% of all adults reported that they were non-denominational. In comparison, around 8% of folks said that they were Southern Baptists. That gap persisted for quite a period of time, with those lines running in parallel until the mid-1990s. Then they began to move towards one another.

From a survey perspective, the rise of non-denominational churches really began to accelerate in the late 1990s and have only continued to accelerate from there. In comparison, the membership of the SBC began to decline around five years earlier. Somewhere around the mid-2000s the lines crossed and non-denominationals became definitively larger than the Southern Baptists by the time Barack Obama took the oath of office.

Anytime you talk about non-denominationals, you hear the same refrain: non-denominationals are just Southern Baptists with a lot less institutional baggage. And, anyone who has spent time around evangelicalism can tell you that this feels like it’s true. But what does the data say about that? That’s what we are going to do today - compare non-denominationals to Southern Baptists on a whole slew of metrics: demographics, religious beliefs and behaviors, and politics.