The Social Sources of Denominationalism

H. Richard Niebuhr's The Social Sources of Denominationalism, published by Henry Holt in 1929, is the classic sociological study arguing that Christian denominational divisions in the United States trace largely to social factors, class, race, region and nationality, rather than to doctrine alone. Its strength is that it remains a foundational, still widely cited text in the sociology of American religion nearly a century after publication. Its limit is that it is an early twentieth century sociological argument built on the denominational landscape of its own time, so a claim about a specific denomination's actual doctrinal history needs a source addressing that history directly rather than Niebuhr's general sociological thesis.