Flawed results, but useful implications

Last week, I cited the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life's new study on the religious landscape in the United States. I want to highlight what I think is a very insightful analysis of that study from David Steinmetz, who teaches church history at Duke Divinity School. Dr. Steinmetz contributes op-ed columns to the Orlando Sentinel, and a few days ago he wrote this article looking at the results of the Pew Forum's survey.

Dr. Steinmetz says that, while the survey's conclusions rest on "impressive data", they nonetheless are "flawed by their failure to understand the nuanced boundaries that exist between and among Christian churches." As an example, he invokes the categories of "mainline", "evangelical", and "historically black" as labels that have limited usefulness. For example, while many historically black denominations exhibit evangelical theology, they rarely self-identify as evangelical (a moniker which is associated with white Protestantism). Moreover, while the United Methodist Church falls under the "mainline" category, there are many United Methodists who do self-identify as evangelicals.

Here's the main point: Steinmetz suggests that labels are more accurate to describe individuals' theological outlook than they are broad denominational identity, exactly because denominational identity means much less than it once did regarding the theological outlook of its members.

Thus, he concludes that while the Pew Forum is accurate in describing the American religious landscape as fluid, "what that thesis means requires analysts to ask questions as nuanced and complex as the reality they are studying -- in short, some better questions than they have asked thus far."

I think Steinmetz is right on in these comments, and they raise the question for me: Are broad religious labels meaningful in any sense, when they are applied to denominational identity? Or conversely, have we reached such a point in Protestant culture that denominations are so pluralistic as to be relatively meaningless as identifiers of theological conviction?

My own contribution to the wide-ranging conversation about the Pew Forum study comes in my current column in the United Methodist Reporter, which takes a wholly different tack than that of Dr. Steinmetz. I look at what the Pew Forum concludes about "net loss" in terms of religious shifting. As a "net loser" of members through such shifting, how can the United Methodist Church better form its members so that they understand their Christian identity in a United Methodist context? As a sanctificationist people, we ought to do that pretty well. The current state of our church suggests that we do not.