The Washington Times has reviewed a new edition of the Encyclopaedia of American Religion. The edition, authored by J. Gordon Melton, shows just how literally Americans take their freedom of religion.
The review reveals a bewildering array of religious groups in America. The Roman Catholic Church may be huge, but it is only one among 116 Catholic denominations.
Orthodox Christians have an even higher total, and Protestantism is notoriously splintered; its Pentecostal segment alone counts groups by the hundreds.
All tastes
There is a denomination for practically everyone. If the Episcopal Church will not do, worshippers can move leftward into the Metaphysical Episcopal Church or Free Episcopal Church or rightward into dozens of breakaways like the Anglican Mission in America.
Does Unitarianism seem too conventional? The denomination offers a subgroup of Unitarian Universalist Pagans.
Moving further from the mainstream, there is always the Church of God Anonymous, the Nudist Christian Church of the Blessed Virgin Jesus, or the Only Fair Religion.
All these are among the 2,630 U.S. and Canadian faith groups described by Mr Melton, a one-time United Methodist pastor, who treats each entry objectively.
The total includes ecumenical organizations, loosely knit movements and defunct faiths. But most are still-existing denominations with distinct flocks. Mr Melton places religions into 26 ‘families’ and then breaks those down into subcategories.
Among religions difficult to classify are the eight that practise drug use, 22 that believe in UFOs,including the Raelians at the centre of the recent human-cloning claims,and 12 mail-order religions that dispense instant clergy credentials or divinity degrees.
Adept
For over forty years the author has compiled data on more creeds than anyone knew existed.
He is especially adept at tracking obscure, smaller groups and takes pride in discovering religions that practise rigorous secrecy, such as the Kennedy Worshippers, who have made the late US president into a divinity, and the Two-by-Twos, a network of nomadic evangelists.
Others Melton mentions: All-One-God-Faith Inc. is simply a soap company that spreads its eclectic doctrines through the labels of its products.
The Church of the New Song (Bluffs, Illinois) recruits prison inmates and once claimed porterhouse steaks and Harvey’s Bristol Cream to be its communion elements.
The Embassy of Heaven considers all earthly governments illegitimate and takes the logical step of issuing its own car licence plates.
The author believes that the United States is the most religiously diverse nation in the world,especially since immigration laws were loosened in 1965,though Europe as a whole, he feels, is comparable.
Christianity is the biggest single element: 70 per cent of Americans belong to ‘some brand of Christian church’.
The latest encyclopaedia, in its seventh edition, has about 250 groups newly listed since the 1999 version.
Evangelicals are hereby reminded that there is a vast chasm between ‘religion’ and the gospel of Jesus Christ.