The utter dishonesty of Steve Ray about 33,000 Protestant denominations.

did not want to write about Steve Ray again after yes­ter­day’s post. But by chance I noticed that he has a brand, spank­ing new arti­cle today that once again ped­dles the myth of 33,000 Protes­tant denom­i­na­tions. And because I refut­ed the num­ber four years ago for the Nation­al Catholic Reg­is­ter, I decid­ed I prob­a­bly need­ed to revis­it the top­ic. Mr. Ray knows the num­ber is fic­tion, for he has been told many times. But he weird­ly insists upon it; he’ll use the expres­sion “the myth of 33,000 denom­i­na­tions” but put scare quotes around the word “myth.” It’s as though he thinks it’s a truth divine­ly revealed. “How many denom­i­na­tions are too many?” he asks in the new arti­cle.

One, Mr. Ray. One is too many. Catholi­cism is not a denom­i­na­tion, and so just one denom­i­na­tion means there is divi­sion in the body of Christ. And any divi­sion is a scan­dal. Two denom­i­na­tions are not twice the scan­dal; ten denom­i­na­tions are not ten times the scan­dal. It’s the same scan­dal. There’s no rea­son to fix­ate upon an absurd­ly inflat­ed num­ber. Truth mat­ters; and the infla­tion dis­tracts from the real issue, which is the scan­dal of divi­sion itself. It does­n’t mat­ter whether there are 33,000 denom­i­na­tions or three.

•••

Mr. Ray’s source for the 33,000 fig­ure is the World Chris­t­ian Ency­clo­pe­dia. There we read:

World Chris­tian­ity con­sists of 6 major eccle­si­as­ti­co-​cul­tur­al blocs, divid­ed into 300 major eccle­si­as­ti­cal tra­di­tions, com­posed [sic] of over 33,000 dis­tinct denom­i­na­tions in 238 coun­tries (Vol. I, p. 16).

So the num­ber 33,000 does not rep­re­sent Protes­tantism; it rep­re­sents “World Chris­tian­i­ty.” WCE goes on to break down the num­ber into com­pos­ite groups:

• Inde­pen­dents: 22,000 denom­i­na­tions
• Protes­tants: 9000 denom­i­na­tions
• Mar­gin­als: 1600 denom­i­na­tions
• Ortho­dox: 781 denom­i­na­tions
• Catholics: 242 denom­i­na­tions
• Angli­cans: 168 denom­i­na­tions

So Mr. Ray’s own source only finds 9000 Protes­tant denom­i­na­tions. 33,000 is every­thing, includ­ing Catholics and East­ern Ortho­dox and a full 23,600 “Inde­pen­dents” and “Mar­gin­als.”

And who are these “Inde­pen­dents” and “Mar­gin­als”? They are, as I wrote at the Reg­is­ter, “groups one would have a hard time call­ing Protes­tant.”

They include Mor­mons (122 denom­i­na­tions), Jehovah’s Wit­nesses (229 denom­i­na­tions), Masons (28 denom­i­na­tions), Chris­tadel­phi­ans (21 denom­i­na­tions) Uni­tar­i­ans (29 denom­i­na­tions), Chris­t­ian Sci­ence (59 denom­i­na­tions), Theosophists (3 more denom­i­na­tions), British Israelites (8 denom­i­na­tions), Pros­per­ity Gospel groups (27 denom­i­na­tions), One­ness Pen­te­costals (680 denom­i­na­tions), “Hid­den Bud­dhist Believ­ers in Christ” (9 denom­i­na­tions), wan­der­ing bish­ops (12 denom­i­na­tions), Inde­pen­dent Nesto­ri­ans (5 denom­i­na­tions), occultists (3 denom­i­na­tions), spiri­tists (20 denom­i­na­tions), Zion­ists (159 denom­i­na­tions), even “Arab radio/​TV net­work” (19 denom­i­na­tions), “gay/​homosexual tra­di­tion” (2 denom­i­na­tions), and schis­matic Catholics (435 denom­i­na­tions). It is a strange and eclec­tic list.

You know who Hid­den Bud­dhist Believ­ers in Christ are, Mr. Ray? They’re Catholics. Specif­i­cal­ly, they are Catholics who keep their Catholi­cism hid­den for fear of reprisal from their gov­ern­ment. The Hid­den Bud­dhist Believ­ers in Christ have noth­ing to to do with Protes­tantism, still less any­thing to do with sola scrip­tura. (Mr. Ray thinks the myth­i­cal 33,000 denom­i­na­tions are a result of the “destruc­tive doc­trine” of sola scrip­tura.)

A sec­ond prob­lem with WCE is its def­i­n­i­tion of “denom­i­na­tion”:

an orga­nized aggre­gate of wor­ship cen­ters or con­gre­ga­tions of sim­i­lar eccle­si­as­ti­cal tra­di­tion with­in a spe­cific coun­try … whose com­po­nent con­gre­ga­tions and mem­bers are called by the same denom­i­na­tional name in dif­fer­ent areas, regard­ing them­selves as one autonomous Chris­t­ian church dis­tinct from oth­er denom­i­na­tions, church­es, and tra­di­tions.

“With­in a spe­cif­ic coun­try”: Do you know what that means? It means that you can’t have a sin­gle denom­i­na­tion in Cana­da and the U.S. at the same time. Even if they are both Pres­by­ter­ian and teach exact­ly the same doc­trine, WCE would count them as two denom­i­na­tions. That’s a recipe for an inflat­ed num­ber.

•••

But watch what Mr. Ray says when con­front­ed by all this; this is from his arti­cle today:

Now, one ques­tion that comes up. [There many more ques­tions than one, Mr. Ray.] Aren’t there 242 “Catholic denom­i­na­tions” men­tioned in the Oxford Dic­tio­nary you quote? I am not sure of the actu­al num­ber, but there are a good num­ber of Catholic schisms that have broke with Rome and set up their own “popes” and con­tin­ue to call them­selves Catholics. So, yes, you can say there are a lot of Catholic schisms, or if you pre­fer, denom­i­na­tions, along with Ortho­dox, Copts and oth­ers. It is a shame on all counts.

Well, yes, it is a shame, Mr. Ray, but none of this has any­thing to do with Protes­tantism or sola scrip­tura. (Inci­den­tal­ly, a good many Copts are in union with Rome.) Schis­mat­ic Catholics are not Protes­tant and don’t adhere to a doc­trine of sola scrip­tura. Nor do the Ortho­dox. Being out of com­mu­nion with Rome does not mean that you are a Protes­tant. To act as though it does betrays your own woe­ful mis­un­der­stand­ing of what Protes­tantism is, let alone the the­o­log­i­cal dis­tinc­tives of, say, Calvin­ism and Armini­an­ism. Do you real­ly think informed Protes­tants are going to be per­suad­ed by any of this? Do you think they will be embar­rassed? They’re laugh­ing, Mr. Ray. And the sad thing is, they ought to laugh.

The WCE includes, among its num­bers, groups that you could­n’t fair­ly call Chris­t­ian, let alone Protes­tant. Uni­tar­i­ans are not Chris­tians. Mor­mons are not Chris­tians. Nesto­ri­an­ism is a heresy. Chris­t­ian Sci­ence is a mis­nomer. Please tell me how One­ness Pen­te­costals count as Chris­t­ian if they reject the Trin­i­ty.

Mr. Ray knows all this but has kept insist­ing on his utter­ly absurd num­ber for some rea­son known only to him­self; per­haps he thinks it would shame him to have to admit he was wrong. I don’t know. Only he can inform us. But now, in his blog post today, he tries to hedge his bets:

The great num­ber of denom­i­na­tions and fac­tions has done great dam­age to the rep­u­ta­tion and cred­i­bil­i­ty of Chris­tian­i­ty. Whether it is 33,000 or what­ev­er large num­ber, it is gross­ly wrong.

So now he claims a form of agnos­ti­cism about it, but he’s cer­tain the num­ber is “large.” This come across as an attempt to cov­er him­self with­out engag­ing in the hard mea max­i­ma cul­pa that ped­dling this absurd num­ber for so long requires. This is embar­rass­ing on a lev­el that’s hard­ly worth respond­ing to, except inso­far as it allows me to point out once more how impor­tant it is that apol­o­gists stop cling­ing to argu­ments that don’t hold up to one moment of real scruti­ny. The 33,000 denom­i­na­tions myth, as I wrote four years ago, has acquired a life of its own due to force of rep­e­ti­tion. But it is utter­ly absurd, and if Catholic apol­o­gists want to be tak­en seri­ous­ly they need to aban­don it.

•••

On that note, I would like to issue a belat­ed apol­o­gy to the Calvin­ist apol­o­gist James White. When I first start­ed blog­ging, I wrote a few arti­cles direct­ed at him about this same top­ic. But I did so in a way that went far over the top in satire, and I don’t think Dr. White man­aged to detect it. In fair­ness, he had no rea­son to be able to detect it; he was­n’t famil­iar enough with me to do so. I ought to have been fair­er to him.