A Deep Dive Into The Presbyterian Church In America

(ANALYSIS) PCA folks, it’s your moment — few denominations punch above their weight online like you do.

I’ve tweeted about this before, but you all play an outsized role in the online discourse about American Protestant Christianity. To celebrate that, I just did a pretty deep dive into the statistical data released by the Presbyterian Church in America. Thanks to their meticulous recordkeeping, I didn’t have to spend hours cleaning and merging data. I can get right to the fun stuff.

And let me say: I’ve just scratched the surface of what this data can tell us.

For the uninitiated, here’s a really quick background on the PCA. It started in 1973, when a bunch of theologically conservative churches broke away from the Presbyterian Church USA.

We would classify the PCA as evangelical, and their major doctrinal positions reinforce this: they don’t ordain women, they maintain that marriage is between a man and a woman, and they are unabashedly Reformed in their doctrine.

They aren’t a particularly large denomination. They have about 400,000 members and less than 1,700 churches.

But they are growing at a nice clip — adding 1.5% to 2% to their membership rolls each year. If you are trying to identify a prominent member of the PCA, the answer is easy: the late Tim Keller.

You can the read the rest of Ryan Burge’s post on Substack.

---

Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.