RELTRAD Affiliation Classification

Religious affiliation classification is the task of turning hundreds of detailed denominational responses on a survey into a small, analytically useful set of religious traditions. The dominant scheme, RELTRAD, was proposed by Brian Steensland and colleagues in their 2000 Social Forces article 'The Measure of American Religion,' which criticized earlier classifications as historically and theologically incoherent and offered seven categories grounded in the development of American religious traditions: evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, Black Protestant, Roman Catholic, Jewish, other faiths, and no religion. By sorting respondents into traditions that share a meaningful religious heritage rather than into ad hoc groupings, RELTRAD became the standard variable through which sociologists relate religion to politics, family, and social attitudes.