This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The sociologist Max Weber and, working somewhat later, Ernst Troeltsch gave the sociological study of religious organization much of the vocabulary it still uses, distinguishing a church, a large body generally at ease with the surrounding society, from a sect, a smaller, more demanding body that defines itself partly by tension with that same surrounding society, a distinction later sociologists have refined considerably but rarely abandoned outright.
Later researchers added a further category, the denomination, describing a body that has settled into stable coexistence with both the wider society and with other religious bodies around it, no longer claiming to be the sole legitimate form of its tradition the way an original sect often does. The American context, with no single established state church, produced an unusually large number of denominations organized this way, part of why the concept was developed largely by American sociologists studying American religious life.
A body's organizational category is rarely permanent; sociologists have documented the same movement shifting from sect to denomination across a generation or two as its initial tension with the surrounding society eases, and a religious organization and structure entry that records only a body's present form risks missing exactly that trajectory, which the underlying research treats as the more interesting part of the story.