The great social, religious, and cultural revolutions of the 1960s may be seen as largely disrupting the second denominational arrangement. Much of this affected denominationalism on the social level. During the 1960s, the unifying social appeal of a “Judeo-Christian ethic” began to receive criticism by advocates of secularist understanding of the separation of church and state, who believed that the government should be far more neutral concerning religious values than it had been in earlier eras. Another set of criticisms came from multiculturalists, who felt that the waves of new immigration from AFRICA and Asia (flowing as a result of changes in immigration law in the mid-1960s), made the old denominational compromise of “Protestant, Catholic, Jew” far too constraining. The presence of Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and others called for a new understanding of the place of religion in American life. The complex new religious make-up of the nation challenged all of the earlier models of denominationalism and raised anew the question of what was to be the nature of the common denominator.
If the social basis of denominationalism was being questioned, so too was the category’s continuing religious usefulness. Particularly because of the crisis in membership and identity among the older “main line” or “old line” denominations beginning in the late 1960s, critics began to claim that denominational identity was both too “high” and too “low” to describe usefully the state of American religious (and particularly Protestant) identity. Loyalty and identity, it was argued, were now more firmly entrenched in both the local community or congregation (in contrast to the large national denomination), and at the same time in broad transdenominational categories of identification. As the importance of personal identity through race, GENDER, sexual orientation, ideology, and so forth grew, denominational identification waned. A conservative evangelical Presbyterian (to use one example) displayed more loyalty to conservative and evangelical principles than to Presbyterian ones. To some, denominations are a relic of the past. The future of the idea of the denomination as it emerged in eighteenth-century America, and as it flourished for well over a century, remains unclear.
Denominations sociologically conceived as voluntary inclusive religious communities are also be found in other societies where there is no established church and freedom of religion is practiced. The degree to which these communities fit the American denominational system in all its permutations is still a matter of debate.
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