Sources of Denominationalism

William Swatos sees the decline of denominations as “a significant shift in Western civilization and its culture,” tied to the changing landscape of global political and economic life (220). To grasp what is happening to denominations, Swatos directs attention to the global political and economic circumstances of their formation.

Post-Reformation Europe saw the rise of state churches, distinguished not only by nationality but by confession. Swatos sees in this a “clearly visible relativizing of all religious claims.” Laud saw what was happening, but as the event showed, his ability to do anything about was severely limited. As global commerce expanded during the same period, merchants of different confessional traditions traded with one another, which “made exclusion less and less possible” (220). (In Swatos’s view, after the Reformation, everyday life was “increasingly separated from the transcendent,” a reality evident in the “denouement of church architecture.” Protestant architects devoted their creative energies to building banks, Rathauser, commercial buildings, rather than churches [220-1].)

Doctrinal distinctives were absorbed into ethnic identity. Swatos points out that when Europeans moved to America, they often maintained their ethnic churches (Swedish Lutheran v. German, Dutch Reformed v. Scottish Presbyterian), despite the fact that doctrinal differences were small. Somewhat exaggeratedly, he writes, “doctrine didn’t matter. The church was no longer the repository of universal Truth but the expression of a locally-defined Way of Life. As this process worked itself out, denominationalism came to replace the older and more facile church-sect dichotomy, and made religion-in-practice far closer to the Durkheimian ideal than might appear on the surface” (221). In short, “denominations are the structural-functional forms that dominant religious traditions assume in a pluralistic culture” (222).

But pluralism doesn’t mean there isn’t an overarching faith in which all denominations participate. Denominationalism is the ecclesial expression of a certain political arrangement, according to which “all denominations . . . are denominations of an overarching civil religion having a clearly statist or nationalistic element. . . . Denominationalism involves being a particular kind of American or Canadians . . . as much as it does being a particular kind of Christian or Jew. . . . Denominational membership symbolizes commitment to society’s highest values, one of which . . . is doctrinal pluralism” (221).

Swatos summarizes his argument in this stark claim: “American society on this model could accommodate the village atheist but not a religious counterculture” (221). Liberalism is more consistent with “denominationalism’s sociocultural character” than fundamentalism, since it more easily accommodates to “the dominant culture.” 

Swatos wrote in 1981, and since then the religious landscape – not to mention the geo-political and economic landscape – has shifts considerably. It’s not clear that fundamentalist counter-cultures are at as much of a disadvantage as he claims. Yet the claim that denominational ecclesial arrangements are symbiotic with liberal polity is spot-on, and our evaluation of the one is going to be linked to our assessment of the other.

(Swatos, “Beyond Denominationalism?: Community and Culture in American Religion, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 20:3 [1981] 217-227.)