Sorting Christians and others into categories:
The faith segments used by the Barna Research Group

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The Barna Research Group is one of the five divisions within the Barna Group, Ltd. That division provides primary research, largely through telephone polls of random selections of American adults. They are arguably the most important polling agency in the field of religion and spirituality in the country. ₁ They were founded in 1984. They offer a free weekly update of their latest research findings. You can subscribe to the report from their web site. ₂

Barna Research has developed a unique set of criteria for sorting individuals into five faith segments. Because of their importance in the religious polling field, their definitions often used by others.

There is little standardization on the meanings of terms in the religious area. For example, in early 2006, Barna reported that only 9% of American adults met their definition of "Evangelical." Other organizations and individuals may well use a much broader definition of this term, and estimate a very different percentage of Evangelicals.

Barna's five segments:

Distribution among the five segments:

N = 1,003; Margin of error ±3.2 percentage points

Downloadable report:

Barna will have a downloadable report available on an after 2006-APR-07 called "State of the Church 2006." Cost of the download is $15.00 See: http://www.barna.org/

References used:

The following information sources were used to prepare and update the above essay. The hyperlinks are not necessarily still active today.

1. "About the Barna Group, Ltd.," at: http://www.barna.org/
2. The Barna web site is at http://www.barna.org
3. We were stymied by the word "notional." We had to look up its meaning. Die.net, a online dictionary, gave many definitions including: "Having descriptive value as distinguished from syntactic category," "not based on fact," "dubious," "being or of the nature of a notion or concept." etc.

Copyright © 2006 by Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance
Originally posted: 2006-MAR
Latest update: 2006-MAR
Author: B.A. Robinson