Denominations and Sects

Denominations and Sects August 20, 2015

In a classic 1962 paper, “The Denomination,” David Martin challenged the prevailing idea that a denomination is an “advanced stage in the development of a sect.” As a sect becomes wealthy and well-established, it softens its rigor, becomes more tolerant and less perfectionist, and eventually settles in comfortably as a denomination.

Martin doesn’t think this fits the facts. Even where it fits fairly well, as in the history of the Quakers, it doesn’t fit entirely, since even successful, wealthy sects tend to retain many of their sectarian features. It doesn’t fit other cases because many denominations – Methodists, for instance – were never sectarian to begin with.

Rather, a denomination is a third type of church organization alongside the church and the sect of classic Troeltschean sociology. Martin identifies a number of the features of denominational Christianity:

1) Unlike the sect and (some) churches, it does not believe that the boundaries of the denomination are the same as the boundaries of salvation. In a widely quoted formulation, Martin writes that “The Jehovah’s witnesses claim that they alone have the key; the Roman Catholics claim that they alone have the keys. The denomination merely claims that while there are doubtless many keys to many mansions it is at least in possession of one of them, and that anyone who thinks he has the sole means to open the heavenly door is plainly mistaken” (5).

2) Denominations have doctrinal standards, but do not see the unity of the church in doctrinal or organizational terms. Rather, “it conceives the essence of the church as being a unity of experience rather than a unity of organization” (5), and further considers the that experiential unity to be one that “largely ignores confessional frontiers” (5). This makes the denomination far more responsive to contemporary opinion than sect or church types.

3) Organization is pragmatic rather than sacral. The principle of denominational organization is “the priesthood of believers” (6). That leaves room for authority and hierarchy of a sort, but the “separated ministry” if retained is “a matter of propriety and convenience.” Ministers may be essential to the performance of sacraments, but that is not because of an indelible character imprinted by ordination but rather because of a division of labor: “in appropriate circumstances a layman may quite legitimately celebrate.” This highlights the way “utilitarian concepts” intrude “into a realm which ecclesiastically is dominated by non-rational sacred values” (7).

4) In moral theory a denomination does not maintain the impossible standards of the sect or relax moral standards after the fashion of churches. It “refuses to relax the tension between love and the law” (10). It is capable of doing this because its moral focus is “fundamentally individualistic.” Unlike some sects, the denomination does not demand revolutionary social change: “In so far as the denomination conceives of social perfection it does so by beginning with the moralization of the individual will. 

Martin concludes by observing a connection between denominational organization  and Anglo-American liberalism, individualism, and pragmatism. The denomination seems almost designed as the ecclesial facet of American civilization.

(Martin, “The Denomination,” British Journal of Sociology 13 [1962] 1-14.)


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