History: December 2021 Archives

While searching for info on the state of Christianity in America circa 1923, when J. Gresham Machen wrote Christianity and Liberalism, I found the US Census Bureau's 1916 two-volume survey:

Religious bodies : 1916 : United States. Bureau of the Census : Internet Archive

This is Volume 1 of a two-volume set, listing Christian denominations and other religious bodies. Includes both statistics and historical information. From the introductory essay:

This report was prepared under the provisions of the permanent census act, approved March 6, 1902, as amended by the act of June 7, 1906. Its purpose is to present statistics of the number of organizations, members, etc., of the different religious denominations of the country and to give, in addition, a review of their historical origin and development, their doctrine, polity, and their missionary, educational, and philanthropic activities....

Another body, known as the "Millenial Dawn," has a number of "meetings" in different parts of the country, as have also the "Russellites," or followers of Pastor Russell [Charles Taze Russell, founder of Jehovah's Witnesses], but in neither case was it feasible to obtain any definite statistics. Inquiries have been made of the bureau in regard to the "Holy Rollers," and an effort was made to identify them with specific organizations. It seems probable that the term applies to certain congregations whose members display physical manifestations in their services, similar to those exhibited by some religious bodies in the latter part of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries, and which attract public notice for a time, but gradually subside into more normal ways of church life.

The page linked above has the summary table of adherents, attendance, congregations, and facilities. The list of changes since 1906 is interesting: New denominations include the Assemblies of God, Pentecostal Holiness Church, and Holiness Churches, reflecting the institutionalization of the Pentecostal movement, and the Albanian, Bulgarian, and Rumanian Orthodox Churches, the Jacobite Church (Assyrian), and the Lithuanian National Catholic Church, reflecting immigration from Eastern Europe and the Levant. Later in the book, there are church statistics by state (Oklahoma had 5,401 congregations with 424,492 members in 1916), adherents by denomination by state by county (Oklahoma is here) and large cities (Oklahoma City is here; Tulsa didn't make the cut of 25,000 inhabitants in the 1910 census). Oklahoma's largest denomination in 1916 was the Southern Baptist Convention (also the most congregations at 1,112), followed by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, with the Roman Catholics in 3rd place.

Volume 2, which has a narrative and detailed statistics about each denomination. is here. The link leads specifically to the narrative for the Assemblies of God, founded in 1914, "following upon the great revival in 1907."

Some other resources of interest:

• Brown, William Adams, The church in America : A study of the present condition and future prospects of American Protestantism, Macmillan, 1922
• Weber, Max, The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, Scribner, 1930
• Interchurch World Movement of North America, Preliminary Grand General Summary, All Budget Statements by Denominations, 1920: A four-page pamphlet printed for the 1920 convention in Atlantic City.
• Krull, Vigilius H., Christian denominations, or, A brief exposition of the history and the teachings of Christian denominations found in English-speaking countries, St. Joseph's Printing Office, Collegeville, Indiana, 1917: A description of Orthodox and Protestant denominations, explaining why they're wrong from a Roman Catholic perspective. Mormons and Dowieites are included with "Other Christian Denominations," but Unitarians, Universalists, Shakers, Swedenborgians, and Christian Scientists are categorized as "Pretending to Be Christians."
• Benson, Robert Hugh, Non Catholic denominations, Longmans, Green & Co., 1921: Another Catholic perspective on Protestants and other Christians in England.

I had the idea of teaching a one-quarter (13-week) adult Sunday School course based on Machen's book, which was written at the dawn of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy, which led to the creation of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1935 and planted the seeds for the cultural and religious divisions that began to emerge in the 1960s. Machen's 7-chapter book would be introduced by an account of early 20th century Christianity in America and the influences of Darwin, Marx, Dewey, Freud, and higher criticism, and would be followed by a history of controversy and denominational division since Machen's time.