The most commonly used taxonomy for categorizing U.S. survey respondents into their respective religious traditions is affectionately known as reltrad. Steensland, B., L. D. Robinson, W. B. Wilcox, J. Z. Park, M. D. Regnerus, and R. D. Woodberry. 2000. "The Measure of American Religion: Toward Improving the State of the Art." Social Forces 79 (1): 291–318. https://doi.org/10/db9hrh.
Recently, Josh Gaghan and I published an update to reltrad, called Reltrad2. Reltrad2 improves how nondenominational and inter-denominational people are classified. In this article, we detail the reasons for our choices: Gaghan, Joshua & David Eagle. 2024. "RELTRAD2: Refining the State of the Art of Religious Classification by Reconsidering the Categorization of Nondenominational Respondents." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12916.
A Stata file was created long ago to make the reltrad variable. I translated it directly to R. I've since modified the code to produce reltrad2. To use this code, you need to download the GSS file in Stata format from NORC's website and edit the file ReltradGSS.R to reflect where the file is stored. The code assumes that the data is in a folder called "Data." Remember to use reltrad2 in the GSS; you must remove the black oversample from the GSS and calculate the final proportions using weights. This repository contains code (GGplotReltrad.R) that produces sample output.
Other datasets will need a customized approach.
email me with questions: david.eagle@duke.edu