So it's
NOT 400,000, and you're padding the numbers.
Fine enough, that's to be expected from a dishonest conservative.
But you should really be careful who and what you go around quoting.
Your link, for starters, is how devastating COVID could be for churches. The churches in the US that were the loudest sqwawkers against taking measures against COVID were -- wait for it ---
white Evangelicals - Stat News. Mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Historically-Black denominations don't have this problem.
This is anecdotal, but I know churches in this city that STILL have extremely strict protocols for their Sunday services, stricter than the city's itself and the state of California's, itself.
That said, this 380,000 figure that you tried to bump up to 400,000 is from the National Congregational Study, which is done by Hartford Seminary, now known as Hartford International University for Religion and Peace. You may be interested to know that Hartford Seminary has long promoted Christian-Muslim dialog, and according to Wikipedia, is "the only accredited Islamic chaplaincy program" (though I'm not exactly what kind of accreditation they're talking about.)
This is the study, or part of it -
http://hirr.hartsem.edu/research/fastfa ... facts.html
Q:
How many religious congregations are there in the United States?
A: There is no official directory for all the congregations in the country, so sociologists of religion have to rely on statistical estimates extrapolated from surveys. These are often disputed, and to complicate matters, thousands of new churches open each year, while thousands of others close. Hartford Institute estimates there are roughly 350,000 religious congregations in the United States. This estimate relies on the RCMS 2010 religious congregations census. Of those, about 314,000 are Protestant and other Christian churches, and 24,000 are Catholic and Orthodox churches. Non-Christian religious congregations
* are estimated at about 12,000.
Want to know more? Visit the Religious Congregations Membership Study (RCMS) - the 2010 US Religion Census report (PDF format) for more information. An alternative discussion of how to come up with a count of congregations in the U.S. can be found in Kirk Hadaway’s and Penny Marler’s article in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Volume 44, Number 3, September 2005, pp. 307-322.
* I.e., "not churches".
So, how big is a "church"? Does a "chruch" include Apostle Sue and her congregation, which happens to be her husband and 2 stepkids? Or is a "church" the converted storefront in the Latino part of town, with the Nicaraguan pastor and 10 people from outside Managua?
Religion in America is a lot more complex than you guys wish to acknowledge.
