Research On Religion | Gordon Melton on Mega-Trends in American Religion

Gordon Melton on Mega-Trends in American Religion

Date: August 16th, 2010

Tags: Baptists, community churches, conservative churches, denominationalism, immigration, liberal churches, megachurches, Methodists, non-affiliation, Pentecostals, Protestantism, race, religious liberty, televangelism

J. Gordon Melton, director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion and Distinguished Senior Fellow at Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, joins RoR to talk about changes in American religion over the past two hundred years. We discuss the importance of denominationalism in American religious life, the influx of new religious movements in the 1960s, the influence of immigration on the spiritual landscape and why there has been a significant decline in the number of “unaffiliated” over the past century (despite a small increase in the past decade). We survey the growth and changes in the Baptist Church, Methodism, Pentecostalism and a number of other groups. Dr. Melton, also an ordained Methodist elder and author of Melton’s Encyclopedia of American Religion, makes the case that denominationalism is an enduring and important component of American religion. The podcast concludes with some thoughts about race and religion in the United States. Recorded: July 7, 2010.

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August 16, 2010 at 7:12 pm

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