I started with a joke. Late one night I floated a theory in a comment section, mostly to see who I’d offend. The theory was this: Your slot in Christianity — Catholic, Orthodox, Reformed, charismatic, whatever — might have less to do with your theology than with your personality. Put another way, maybe your Myers-Briggs type predicts your pew.

So I built a grid. Sixteen types, sixteen streams. ENFJ, the one who thinks everyone can be reached, runs on mission and warmth. Methodist. INTJ loves Calvinism because the logic is airtight. Reformed, obviously — Jonathan Edwards with a study Bible and a spreadsheet. ENFP needs to feel it. Hands up, eyes closed, front row of the charismatic service. ISTJ wants order, duty, and a really good liturgy. Missouri Synod Lutheran. ESTP shows up to the megachurch, gets inspired, and is in the car before the closing song.

I called it half-formed and possibly very wrong and invited the whole comment section to tell me I’d lost it. But it wasn’t only a bit. It started with something I’d been chewing on for a while.

Why was everyone at my church so introverted? They liked me. They just seemed to want me to sit beside them in a class rather than actually talk, which, it turns out, is how introverts bond. I am not one. I have 4,000 names in my phone.

We have never trusted personality tests more than we do right now. By the test maker’s own count, 88% of Fortune 500 companies have run their people through the Myers-Briggs. Around two million take it every year. McKinsey uses it. Federal agencies use it. Somewhere in your office, there’s a color-coded chart of everyone’s DiSC type taped to a wall.

The church went all in too. Walk into a mid-sized church, and the leadership team has done StrengthsFinder. The small groups are working through Enneagram books. Some church-planting networks now fold personality tests into how they screen the guys they send out. We took a nine-pointed diagram a mystic named Gurdjieff brought west a century ago and dropped it into the new members’ class.

None of it is settled science. Take the same test twice, and you can come out a different letter. People admit this, cheerfully, and take it again anyway. We trust these things enough to hire with them, to build teams with them, and to plant churches with them.

And we never once get mad about them. No one has ever said “screw that guy for being an ISTJ.” Nobody storms out over a DiSC profile. Your StrengthsFinder top five has never started a fight in a parking lot. Your Enneagram number is allowed to just be your number.

Then we get to denomination, and the grace runs out. We’ll go to war over that one. Split churches. Write 4,000-word takedowns of men we’ve never met. “To hell with that guy,” as long as “that guy” is a Catholic. Or a Calvinist. Or a charismatic.

This made me wonder if we’ve been aiming at the wrong target the whole time, if the tag we’re ready to damn each other over is sitting right on top of the one we’d never say a word about. So I went looking to see if anyone had actually studied it. Turns out someone spent 30 years on it.

The professor who counted the pews

His name is Leslie Francis. He’s a professor at the University of Warwick, an ordained minister, and the author of a small library of peer-reviewed studies on personality and religion. He took thousands of pastors and churchgoers, ran them through psychological type measures, and published his findings in journals with names like Mental Health and Religion & Culture. And the pattern he found is the one I was joking about.

Churchgoers are not a random sample of humanity. They lean hard toward one temperament. Sensing and Judging: the SJ. The dutiful, the orderly, the people who show up early and bring the casserole. Among American Catholic priests, more than a quarter test as ISTJ. In the general male population, it’s about one in six. The people running to the altar are wired a certain way before they ever get there. And a lot of them are introverted, the ones who’d rather you take the seat beside them than start a conversation. My church wasn’t the weird one; I was.

Same church. Same theology. Different brains.

Here’s the part that stopped me. For his cleanest test, Francis used a big denomination that fits two very different churches under one roof. On one side, the sermon-first churches. Bible-centered, plain, practical. Give me the text and the application. On the other, the ritual-first churches. Ceremony, reverence, mystery, a service that carries you more than it explains things to you.

If you grew up mainline Protestant in the Midwest, you already know this split. It’s the contemporary service and the traditional service. These services are in the same church, sometimes the same building. The sermon-first room has the drum kit, the lyrics on a screen, and a pastor in untucked flannel. The ritual-first room has the organ, the hymnal, and the order of worship your grandma would recognize.

Then the researchers counted who sat in each. In the sermon-first churches, 83% tested as Sensing types. Concrete, literal, and practical. In the ritual-first churches, that dropped to 69%. The room filled up with Intuitives. The people who reach for symbol, mystery, the thing behind the thing. Same denomination. Two personalities, sorted by whether the church has an organ or a fog machine.

And before you say it’s really just theology in disguise, they checked. In a follow-up study of more than a thousand pastors, the same split held up even after the researchers controlled for how conservative and how charismatic each person was. Strip out the theology, and the personality gap is still there. Their own conclusion was that it tracks a preference for a style of worship, not a doctrine.

The organ people and the fog-machine people were sorting themselves by temperament. They just called it conviction.

It keeps going

Francis’s team has a profile for charismatics, too. Higher charismatic orientation lines up with Extraversion, Feeling, and Perceiving. The exact wiring of the person who wants to feel the room, follow the moment, and isn’t watching the clock. My ENFP card, more or less, sitting in a peer-reviewed table.

Studies of brand-new churches, the kind meeting in a school gym or a movie theater, find they pull more Intuitives, more Extraverts, and more Perceivers than the established church down the road. The startup guy in the room, basically.

The science is cleaner than my original joke. It doesn’t say INTJ equals Presbyterian. It says the sensing-intuition axis maps onto ritual-versus-sermon. It says the dutiful SJ fills the traditional pew. It says the feelers chase the charismatic moment. And nearly all of it is British data on Protestants, so stretching it over a Texas megachurch is my leap, not theirs.

But the spine of the joke was right, and a British professor spent three decades proving it.

So what do you do with a theory like this

Here’s the uncomfortable part. If the stream you’re in is partly a function of how your brain came wired, a few of our favorite arguments look smaller.

The Bible-church guy who thinks the liturgy crowd is soft is, in part, a Sensing preference sneering at an Intuitive one. The traditionalist who finds the megachurch shallow is, in part, an Intuitive wrinkling his nose at a room full of Sensors having a perfectly nice time. We dress our temperament up as discernment, and we call our comfort zone orthodoxy.

None of this makes anybody’s theology wrong. Calvinism isn’t false because it flatters the INTJ. Beauty isn’t a gimmick because Intuitives can’t live without it. Whether a thing is true and who’s drawn to it are two different questions, and the studies don’t touch the first one.

But it brings me back to where I started. We forgive each other every other label. The Enneagram four gets to be dramatic. The ISTJ gets to color-code the church directory, and we call it a spiritual gift. Denomination is the one tag we damn each other over, and it might be the one sitting closest to the wiring we already agreed to forgive.

I’m not asking anyone to stop believing their tradition is the right one. I believe mine is. But it’s worth holding the possibility that the believer across town isn’t your enemy or your project. He might just be a different type, hearing the same gospel in a different key, sitting in the pew that fits how he was built.

***

Seth Tower Hurd writes The Five, a twice-weekly newsletter covering the news and culture stories that don’t make the front page. Find it at sethtowerhurd.substack.com.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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