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Imprecise definition of evangelicals skews all kinds of cultural analysis. The capacious definition that finds more than one-fourth of American adults to fit the label also lies behind headlines that claim evangelicals divorce and engage in extramarital sex at rates indistinguishable from those of the general population. John G. Stackhouse's critique of Ronald Sider's The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience turns on precisely this point (Books & Culture, July/August 2007). Political analyses that assign a matrix of supposedly "evangelical" concerns to one-fourth of the electorate also falter. We're talking about a tradition in which a substantial portion of the congregations are not affiliated with any denomination, or any other church, in any formal way. Evangelicals do not lend themselves well to generalizations.

"Mainline" is an even more slippery label, one without much scholarly investigation or even history of usage. The term seems to have sprung fully formed into discourse around 1960 to describe mostly white, liberal, and middle- to upper-class churches with primarily northeastern roots. It is almost always used to describe whole churches or denominations, in contrast to "evangelical," which has more individual than institutional overtones. Basically, it is one of those words whose meaning seems obvious until you actually try to define it.

The largest contributors to the mainline total on the Pew survey are the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the American Baptist Church, the Presbyterian Church in the USA, and the Episcopal Church. All of these churches fit the basic mainline profile, but they also have something else in common: all of them are embroiled in bitter controversies over the ordination of homosexuals and related issues of authority and biblical interpretation. Pew does count as evangelicals the survey respondents who choose one of these denominations but also self-identify as born-again or evangelical, but even this attempt fails to account for the internal diversity of the mainline. Clearly there are a lot of conservatives (if not card-carrying evangelicals) in these churches, else the fighting would have been over long ago.

The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey usefully conveys a lot of information about faith in America. But as it can be helpful to toggle between road, satellite, and terrain maps online, it is helpful to compare the image drawn by social scientists with images drawn by historians and theologians. Surveyors do not always see the historical patterns or theological values that matter most to other scholars or to religious Americans. As mapping sites remind us, directions are for planning purposes only. The reality on the ground can look quite different.

Elesha Coffman is a doctoral student in American religious history at Duke University. She is a former managing editor of Christian History magazine.

Copyright © 2008 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey is available at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life's website.

Other news coverage includes:

America's Unfaithful Faithful | Americans are a religious people, but they switch religious groups with surprising frequency, a major new survey finds (Time)

Poll Finds a Fluid Religious Life in U.S. | More than a quarter of adult Americans have left their childhood faith for another religion or no religion. (The New York Times)

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February (Web-only) 2008, Vol. 52