I try to correct for this to the extent reasonably possible, but my corrections are quite limited. So I do correct for the Jewish head of household issue but I don't correct for Baptist undercount of kids.
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This one was really interesting to me because early American history actually has tons of Unitarians showing up in important places and I'm like, "I literally have only ever met maybe one Unitarian ever?????" and this sort of helps explain what's going on!
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from 1790-1850 there were probably more Unitarian-ish Americans than there were Episcopals which is pretty remarkable IMHO
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oh btw I did baptists. guys since the 1990s like the ground has just fallen out from under American baptist religion. like holy cow what even is going on here.pic.twitter.com/w8CCuzTxVV
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from 15% of the population in the early 1990s to under 10% today. Baptists have lost over *third* of their relative position in society in under 30 years. That is not what I had in my head.
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what's behind this? well, every major subgroup of baptists has seen a decline in its share of US population.pic.twitter.com/iRwCPKNgFr
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and why is that? Well.... it's a BIT tricky to say. The reality is that baptist data is pretty bad in general and data for the Historically Black Baptist denominations is even worse. Data for baptists is sporadic, vague, sometimes overlapping, etc.
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So it's well within the realm of possibility that there's like some start-up denomination of baptists with a quarter of a million members that I'm just completely missing. But you work with what you've got!
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The most consistent and reliable data is reported by the Southern Baptist Convention and it shows the trend I'm talking about tho so I'm reasonably confident that even the less reliable data is showing broadly correct signals in terms of scale and direction.
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been doing congregationalism but before I share that let me bounce back to Baptists. Like 50 of you responded being all, "well nondenoms are just baptists by another name." Having been raised nondenom I think y'all are smokin' some strong stuff.
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Some nondenoms are baptistic. Some are not. The one I grew up in was not particularly Baptist in doctrine at all. But whatever the case, I do have data on nondenoms. US Religion Censuses occur at the *church* level and then *compile* to the denominational level.
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The result is that these sources actually pick up a ton of churches with no denominational affiliations (including the one I grew up in). We can compare that data to Pew data on people who report attending non-denominational churches as well and get a decent estimate.
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So here's what the graphs look like. If you assume that all nondenominational people are basically just Baptists, here's how things can look. As you can see, even with nondenoms included, the combined grouping is rapidly shrinking.pic.twitter.com/gcnLjC9rkB
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Congregationalism was a big deal in 1700!! Not so much now. Or like any time since 1776.
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Several people made wisecracks about the Shakers during this thread and folks I HAVE NOT NEGLECTED THE SHAKERS. Actually I grew up 15 minutes from a very large former Shaker community interestingly enough.
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But here I want to compare two different groups: a large communitarian Christian-origin body that eschews babies, and a large communitarian Christian-origin denominational family that is famous for having gigantic families. Note the difference. (cc
@JonCoppage )pic.twitter.com/d12QKWdQ51
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btw low early growth of Hutterians is largely because there was a lot of indecision early on in the community about Canada vs. USA and where to settle, and also I suspect there was some misreporting in the data.
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them: we should grow the church by making disciples not just making babies me:pic.twitter.com/2YMCkgGyBa
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guys Adventism is growing explosively. I did not know this. What are they doing to grow so much????pic.twitter.com/XU3Lpuoa5V
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Graph for JW's looks pretty similar until very recently btw.pic.twitter.com/MIDBpg710Q
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End of conversation
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