By Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy
Mark Tooley’s remarks at Mt. Bethel United Methodist Church in Marietta, Georgia at the Areopagus Forum on February 18
This year is an ignominious anniversary for Mainline Protestantism, commemorating a half century of continuous decline since their membership peaks in the early 1960s. Fifty years ago one of every six Americans belonged to the Seven Sisters of Mainline Protestantism. Today it’s one of every 16 and plunging. Membership has dropped from 30 million to 20 million during a time when Americas population has nearly doubled. And it did so despite Gallup Poll’s insistence that overall church attendance has remained essentially the same for about the last 80 years.
In our current post denominational age, many question why this decline matters. Who cares about the Mainline except the dwindling and increasingly aged members who remain? After all, haven’t evangelical churches, especially nondenominationals, plus Catholicism, more than filled the void? Wasn’t it time for the Mainline to leave the stage, having more than played its part in American and Christian history across 4 centuries? And in the end, didn’t they deserve their own demise?
The answers are yes and no. The decline is indeed deserved and self precipitated, but nonetheless very sad for America and the Body of Christ, leaving a spiritual and cultural void that Evangelicals and Catholics, even with their increased numbers, have not been able to fill.
Mainliners literally founded America, from Jamestown and Plymouth Rock, generated its founding principles, which have become universal, and were the spiritual and cultural flagships for our nation for over 350 years. They shaped how we publicly lived out faith and applied it to our democratic process. They created civil religion, which uniquely in the world protected and integrated religion into every aspect of public life without legally establishing any particular religion.
The Mainline’s implosion in part facilitated the culture wars and polarization since the 1960s. With three centuries of experience, the Mainline knew how to lead, to unify and to challenge all at the same time. It offered continuity. It was thoroughly American yet also rooted in the European Reformation. Evangelicalism and Catholicism can’t replace it. One is maybe too much an American creation, and the other is perhaps not American enough.
Mainline Protestantism lost its way when it forgot how to balance being American and being Christian, choosing American individualism and self made spirituality over classical Christianity.
Related article: Evangelicals must resist Mainline Protestant trajectory
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Since the Bible has been thrown away by the mainline denominations, look at the result socially, spiritually and individually??
Those of us still in the pcusa are keeping our commitments to our local churches, Tooley just hit the nail on the head.
The PCUSA is much like a big city, Philly, Chicago, LA, that has been run by one political party (usually Democrats) for generations. With no real ideological or political completion to either moderate or provide checks and balances, corruption and inefficiency run rampant. The organization fails to deliver basic goods and services to its people. In the case of the cities mentioned, public schools fail, taxes out of control, crime, trash, people flee to the suburbs.
In the case of the PCUSA, a distant and out of touch oligarch runs the process, unresponsive to either their needs or perceived concerns, poor leadership, incompetent management. People flee the pews and its message. In Detroit, they declare bankruptcy. If the PCUSA were so fortunate.
Mark Tooley has a gift of framing some very big issues with a few words.
The main line churches are the pillars, the defining support, of Americas spritual life. There is nothing either in the Catholic or Charismatic, or the mega churches, that compares. Not only is it tied in with the Gospel, which continues to inspire and continues to be preached, but the parallel between the American way of life, the American system if you will, and the ways of the main line churches are irrefutable.
This is why the adversary is so delighted with the bruising of main line Protestantism. He dances with delight at our troubles.
One way back has the newly formed denominations rebuilding the church from the ashes of the old. This will require inspired ministers. Might be overdue.
If two terms come to mind when discussing the PCUSA it is necrotic and doubt. The system itself is dead, the flesh and bones of the organization dead or exhausted. The polity broken.
The organization doubts itself, lost faith in Christ and presents to the world a bloodless Savior and a faith that leads to nowhere. Much like the people of old wondering in the dessert looking for water and food, they drop off and die off over time, but the darkness at the end of the PCUSA tunnel, is more just more darkness.