No, There Aren’t 50,000 Protestant Denominations—Let’s Retire That Zombie Statistic

Every few months the same claim shuffles back onto the internet like it escaped from a 1990s apologetics tract: Protestants have 40,000 (or 50,000!) denominations. It sounds catastrophic—like the Tower of Babel funded by Zondervan—but it rests on a misunderstanding so basic it would make the original researchers wince. The number comes from David Barrett’s World Christian Encyclopedia and later the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell. But here’s the catch: Barrett didn’t define a “denomination” the way normal people do. He counted any autonomous Christian group in a single country as a separate entry. So the same communion gets multiplied across the map—Anglicans in Kenya, Anglicans in Canada, Anglicans in Korea—each tallied as a different “denomination.” Suddenly the math looks a lot less apocalyptic.

Once you notice that trick of the light, the whole statistic deflates. Most of the “denominations” are not splinter groups with quirky doctrinal manifestos; they’re independent churches in the Global South, mission-planted networks, or house-church movements that share the same core theology. Barrett himself estimated that roughly 25,000 of his entries belonged to the “independent” category: often Pentecostal, often indigenous, and often indistinguishable in belief from their parent traditions. And here’s the kicker that never makes it into the meme: by Barrett’s method, Catholicism doesn’t count as one church either. Depending on how you slice it, the database lists more than 200 distinct Catholic bodies, which is awkward if the point was to prove Rome stands alone in monolithic unity.

The strangest part is how easily this statistic became a weapon. Around the early 2000s it migrated from a descriptive academic study into a polemical talking point, mostly in internet debates and paperback conversions stories. But statistics don’t get to mean whatever we want. If someone wants to argue that Protestant divisions are spiritually tragic, fine—Paul beat them to it in 1 Corinthians. Just don’t hang the whole case on a bloated number that measures geography and church polity instead of theology. It’s like counting every Starbucks location and concluding there are 28,000 different philosophies of coffee.

The reality is less dramatic and more ordinary. The vast majority of the world’s Protestants belong to a handful of historic families—Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal—that agree on the basics of the faith: the Trinity, the deity of Christ, salvation by grace, the authority of Scripture. That doesn’t erase real differences or the scandal of division, but it does mean the “50,000 denominations” trope tells us nothing useful about unity, truth, or the credibility of sola Scriptura.

So, the next time someone drops the zombie-statistic into a conversation, don’t panic. Just remember: the number isn’t measuring theological chaos. It’s measuring how many ways you can count the same thing if you keep changing the mailing address.