JOURNAL for the SCIENTIFIC STUDY of RELIGION Black Reltrad: Measuring Religious Diversity and Commonality Among African Americans J ASON E. SHELTON Department of Sociology and Anthropology University of Texas at Arlington RYON J. COBB School of Social Work University of Texas at Arlington The Black Church has remained an important topic of scholarly interest for more than a century, but less attention has been devoted to the consequences of contrasting denominational affiliations within the African-American Protestant religious tradition. We advance a new coding scheme that allows researchers to measure and test black affiliates across a range of denominations with roots inside and outside of the greater Black Church. Findings from the 1972 to 2014 General Social Surveys indicate that our “Black Reltrad” syntax more meticulously captures similarities and differences among African Americans with respect to religious sensibilities, religious-related social attitudes, and engagement in black politics than extant coding schemes. Consequently, although the legacy of racial discrimination and inequality binds blacks together, scholars must also recognize differences within the African-American Protestant religious tradition. Keywords: African Americans, the Black Church, politics. INTRODUCTION The Black Church is one of the most vibrant and vital religious institutions in the United States. For nearly four centuries, it has remained a central feature of the black experience by helping African Americans navigate the hardships of slavery and segregation, as well as galvanize victories of the civil rights movement and the election of our nation’s first black president. While it is widely known that most blacks are Baptist, Methodist, or Pentecostal, comparatively few studies assess consequences of the wide range of denominational affiliations that fall under the umbrella of the “Greater Black Church” (Lincoln and Mamiya 1990). This void in our knowledge is attributable to the established principle that for African Americans, differences across Protestant affiliations pale in comparison to structural and cultural similarities resulting from the legacy of racial discrimination and inequality (Brown 2009, 2006; Brown and Brown 2003; Cone 1975, 1969; Harris 1994; Lincoln and Mamiya 1990; Pattillo-McCoy 1998; Raboteau 1978; Shelton and Emerson 2012; Wilmore 1973). Although we do not dispute this claim, the goal of the current project is to document the wealth of faith-based variation within the African-American Protestant religious tradition. This article enhances our knowledge of the extent of religious diversity and commonality among African Americans. More specifically, we advance a new coding scheme for classifying religious affiliations among black respondents in the 1972–2014 General Social Surveys, and test its predictive power alongside the two most relevant and comparable coding schemes in the current literature. As shown here, faith-based variation among blacks can widely differ depending upon the method in which scholars categorize respondents’ religious affiliations. Our Acknowledgments: We would like to thank Jerry Z. Park, Michael Emerson, and several anonymous reviewers for their insightful recommendations on a previous draft of this article. Correspondence should be addressed to Jason E. Shelton, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Texas at Arlington, 601 S. Nedderman Drive #430, Arlington, TX 76019-0599. E-mail: jeshelton@uta.edu Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (2018) 00(00):1–28 C  2018 The Society for the Scientific Study of Religion