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<\/a>The New York Times\u2019<\/em> Ross Douthat<\/a> a few days ago observed that\u00a0the Episcopalians\u2019 and Presbyterians\u2019 recent conventions didn\u2019t \u201cseem to be offering anything you can\u2019t already get from a purely secular liberalism.\u201d In other words, why bother going to such a\u00a0church when you can get more at the Rotary Club or your favorite sports bar? The same week, Gallup released a new poll<\/a> showing that Americans have decreasing faith in organized religion as an institution.<\/p>\n However, their disinterest isn\u2019t in the Almighty. Gallup consistently shows that an overwhelming majority \u2013 more than three-fourths \u2013 of Americans say they are Christians.<\/p>\n Worldwide, church membership is up \u2013 and growing. Gordon<\/a>-Conwell Theological Seminary<\/a>\u2019s Center for Global Christianity<\/a> reports that there are 1.1 billion Roman Catholics \u2013 and in the next 12 years, the number will increase 15.5 percent to 1.3 billion. In the same period, traditional mainline Protestants are expected to grow by 11.22 percent \u2013 from 346 million to 385 million.<\/p>\n However, another unsung group of Christians is eclipsing the traditional mainline Protestants. Evangelical independents are projected to grow 15.8 percent by 2025 to 437 million \u2013 50 million more than the traditional mainstream Protestants.\u00a0These are\u00a0churches that don\u2019t answer to any central hierarchy.<\/p>\n Reporting the numbers of these generally conservative and Bible-based Christians is tough since independents don\u2019t turn their numbers in to any central headquarters.<\/p>\n Such independents have already outstripped the traditional\u00a0mainline Protestants, according to Gordon-Conwell, which estimated their numbers at 377 million. But it\u2019s not easy for religion writers to report on this\u00a0nonconforming group. And so in the last week, the old\u00a0mainline churches continued to get the big headlines \u2013\u00a0debating cross-dressing clergy, same-sex marriage and other liberal causes such as supporting the Palestinians over the Israelis.<\/p>\n But, how relevant are they? Do their announcements and pronouncements mean anything to anybody outside of their ever-shrinking circles? Why are they even newsworthy these days? After all, more kids play\u00a0baseball<\/a> than the entire membership of the Episcopal Church U.S.A. There are 10 times more stamp collectors<\/a> in America than Congregationalists.<\/p>\n The old\u00a0mainline churches\u00a0have been in\u00a0sharp\u00a0decline for the last 50 years, according to the National Council of Churches Yearbook.<\/a> Membership of America\u2019s \u201cbig five\u201d mainline Protestant denominations, the Episcopal, United Methodist, Presbyterian (USA) and Christian (Disciples of Christ), all combined \u2013\u00a0has shrunk\u00a0until their numbers together are smaller than the Southern Baptists.<\/p>\n The Southern Baptist Convention reports 16.2 million members. Again, it is difficult to report actual Baptist numbers\u00a0due to\u00a0all the unaffiliated and independent Baptists\u00a0that dot the countryside —\u00a0Alliance Baptists, American Baptists, Bible Baptists, Conservative Baptists, Continental Baptists, Evangelical Free Baptists, Free Will Baptists, Full Gospel Baptists, Fundamental Baptists, General Baptists, Indian Baptists, Landmark Baptists, Missionary Baptists, National Baptists, Primitive Baptists, Reformed Baptists, Regular Baptists, Old Regular Baptists, Seventh Day Baptists, Six-Principle Baptists, Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptists, United Baptists, Welcoming and Affirming Baptists, and Unity Baptists.<\/p>\n Given the rise in such non-mainline groups, will the old Protestant churches soon fade away? Their defenders roll their eyes in boredom\u00a0at assertions\u00a0that they are approaching irrelevancy. But, frankly, if somebody announced that\u00a0all 150 of the\u00a0Shakers left in the U.S. had voted against funding NASA, who would care?<\/p>\n Today’s\u00a0old mainline Protestant\u00a0churches have shrugged off such baggage as the inerrancy of the Scriptures and the divinity of Jesus. Their apologists\u00a0sigh impatiently\u00a0at any talk of sin or repentance or hell \u2013 making the casual observer wonder why they don\u2019t remove the stained glass windows, too \u2013 which eventually are going to offend somebody.<\/p>\n Douthat suggests that the Episcopalians and Presbyterians \u201cpause, amid their frantic renovations, and consider not just what they would change about historic Christianity, but what they would defend and offer uncompromisingly to the world. Absent such a reconsideration, their fate is nearly certain: they will change, and change, and die.\u201d<\/p>\n While indignantly denying their impending demise, the Episcopalians quietly voted to sell their Manhattan headquarters because they can\u2019t even pay for its upkeep. Yet, the big media headline was their approval of\u00a0transgender clergy and homosexual marriage.\u00a0At their own convention,\u00a0the Presbyterians seemed headed in the same direction, then hesitated, falling short of the votes needed to embrace same-sex weddings and shunning anybody who does business with Israel.<\/p>\n \u201cAt its biannual conference,\u201d reported the Huntington Post\u2019s <\/em>Robert P. Jones<\/a>, \u201cthe General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) debated for more than three hours before narrowly rejecting a bid to modify the definition of marriage in the church constitution as \u2018a covenant between two people.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cToday the Episcopal Church,\u201d mused Douthat, \u201cis flexible to the point of indifference on dogma, friendly to sexual liberation in almost every form, willing to blend Christianity with other faiths, and eager to downplay theology entirely in favor of secular political causes.\u201d Members\u00a0have responded by\u00a0voting with their feet \u2013 demonstrating that these are not the issues that draw them to church. Neither is \u201cecumenism\u201d \u2013 trying to unite the old, shrinking\u00a0Protestant churches.<\/p>\n \u201cDuring 1960s-era social transformations, conservative laity withdrew money and support from organized ecumenism,\u201d notes Jill Gill on the Religion Dispatches website.<\/a> \u201cMeanwhile young liberal Christians often left it behind to do social justice work within a secular environment that offered quicker, bolder action. Others comprised a growing exodus of people embracing a post-Protestant \u2018spiritual but not religious\u2019 identity, while adults still within the fold bore fewer children than evangelicals. Many secular intellectuals pooh-poohed religion altogether, as the Democratic party excised religious values from its lingo.<\/p>\n \u201cThe result: greying mainline denominations struggling to pay bills while facing steady membership and funding declines. Its corollary: an ecumenical movement facing even steeper financial challenges, worsened by the recession. News of a resulting restructuring effort underway in the nation\u2019s historic flagship ecumenical organization, the National Council of Churches, is occasionally met with the query: \u2018You mean it\u2019s not dead yet?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Nevertheless, religion writers\u00a0came away\u00a0from the Episcopal and Presbyterian conventions praising the events. Indignation resounded at Douthat\u2019s and other observers’ assessments. In one of the milder rebuttals, theology professor Sarah Morice-Brubaker<\/a> chided the Times<\/em> columnist:<\/p>\n \u201cRoss Douthat is telling stories again. He is a very good and compelling storyteller, which you can tell from the fact that he can tell (beg pardon) an old old story, and somehow it\u2019s still fresh and interesting.<\/p>\n \u201cYou probably know this story: it\u2019s about a character called Liberal Christianity, and how it fatuously chased after every faddish cause that came down the pike in a misguided attempt to be relevant and popular. But then \u2013 oh, the irony! \u2013 it turned out that people who bothered with Christianity actually wanted churches that stood by timeless principles, and so they left. So sad! Now Liberal Christianity is left mostly alone, a victim of its own stinking desperation. For it has become, in his words, \u2018flexible to the point of indifference on dogma, friendly to sexual liberation in almost every form, willing to blend Christianity with other faiths, and eager to downplay theology entirely in favor of secular political causes.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n In the Huntington Post, <\/em>religion writer <\/em>Dianna Butler Bass<\/a> scoffed at Douthat, noting, \u201cIn recent days, conservatives have attacked the Episcopal Church. The reason? The church has just concluded its once every three-year national meeting, and in this gathering the denomination affirmed a liturgy to bless same-sex unions. Conservatives assert that the Episcopal Church’s ever-increasing social and political progressivism has led to a precipitous membership decline and ruined the denomination.<\/p>\n \u201cMany of the criticisms were mean-spirited or partisan,\u201d wrote Bass, \u201ccontinuing a decade-long internal debate about the Episcopal Church’s future. However, Douthat broadened the discussion.<\/p>\n \u201cDouthat insists that any denomination committed to contemporary liberalism will ultimately collapse. According to him, the Episcopal Church and its allegedly trendy faith, a faith that varies from a more worthy form of classical liberalism, is facing imminent death.<\/p>\n \u201cHis argument, however, is neither particularly original nor true. It follows a thesis first set out in a 1972 book, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing<\/em><\/a> by Dean Kelley. Drawing on Kelley’s argument, Douthat believes that in the 1960s liberal Christianity overly accommodated to the culture and loosened its ties to tradition.”<\/p>\n Indeed, \u201cAmid the current neglect and hostility toward organized religion in general,\u201d Kelley wrote, \u201cthe conservative churches, holding to seemingly outmoded theology and making strict demands on their members, have equalled or surpassed in growth the early percentage increases of the nation\u2019s population.”<\/p>\n Kelley noted that it had been generally assumed that churches, \u201cif they want to succeed, will be reasonable, rational, courteous, responsible, restrained, and receptive to outside criticism.\u201d These churches would be highly concerned with preserving \u201ca good image in the world\u201d \u2014 and that meant especially within the world of the cultural elites. These churches, intending to grow, would be \u201cdemocratic and gentle in their internal affairs\u201d \u2014 as the larger world defines those qualities. These churches will intend to be cooperative with other religious groups in order to meet common goals, and thus \u201cwill not let dogmatism, judgmental moralism, or obsessions with cultic purity stand in the way of such cooperation and service.\u201d<\/p>\n However, the opposite is true, wrote Kelley: ‘These expectations are a recipe for the failure of the religious enterprise, and arise from a mistaken view of what success in religion is and how it should be fostered and measured.'”<\/p>\n \u201cThat was 1972,”\u00a0downplayed Bass.\u00a0“Forty years later, in 2012, liberal churches are not the only ones declining. It is true that progressive religious bodies started to decline in the 1960s. However, conservative denominations are now experiencing the same.\u201d<\/p>\n That justification was repeated in the other attacks on Douthat — claims that\u00a0now conservative\u00a0churches are shrinking, too.<\/p>\n “Certainly attendance in the Episcopal church is decreasing, but, as many of the critics of Douthat\u2019s piece have pointed out, church attendance is decreasing across the board,” proclaimed religion writer Jonathan D. Fitzgerald.<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n The problem with that defense\u00a0is that the\u00a0decline at conservative churches\u00a0is miniscule. Membership loss by the Southern Baptists this year, for example, was cause for concern at their annual convention — but amounted to\u00a0less than 1 percent.<\/p>\n Why are the defenders of the shrinking Protestant mainline churches so\u00a0annoyed with this entire discussion — or assertions that they are increasingly irrelevant to anybody but themselves?<\/p>\n For one thing, Douthat had dared to cite yet once again\u00a0John Shelby Spong\u2019s 1998 book Why Christianity Must Change or Die.\u00a0<\/em>\u201cThe reliably controversial Episcopal bishop of Newark,\u201d wrote the Times<\/em> columnist, \u201cwas a uniquely radical figure \u2013 during his career, he dismissed almost every element of traditional Christian faith as so much superstition \u2013 but most recent leaders of the Episcopal Church have shared his premise. Thus their church has spent the last several decades changing and then changing some more, from a sedate pillar of the WASP establishment into one of the most self-consciously progressive Christian bodies in the United States.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd in the process, they have provoked a historic schism\u201d with entire dioceses going to court attempting to separate their churches from the denomination — and losing. At the convention, the hierarchy reported headquarters had spent $18 million suing its own congregations \u2013 forcing them in court to leave behind buildings they\u2019ve built over the last 250 years with their own sacrifices, labor and love. At last count, nine bishops had decried the convention\u2019s actions in a formal statement. Entire congregations have ceremoniously filed out of the buildings they lost in court and walked down the sidewalk to new facilities where they have started again, liberated from the dictates of a headquarters that had dramatically failed them — attempting to force failure and death on their congregations.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Episcopalians are hardly alone,\u201d observes Joseph Bottum.<\/a> \u201cMany commentators, analyzing the decline of liberal denominations in recent decades, have pointed to the gains of conservative churches.” He, again,\u00a0cites\u00a0Kelley,\u00a0who started the discussion of why people go to church. Is it to be told that sins listed in the Bible really aren\u2019t wicked anymore? To hear that the the Bible is a compilation of Babylonian fairy tales? To listen to doubts over whether Jesus rose from the dead? To debate whether it’s OK to appoint as bishop a man\u00a0married to another\u00a0man?<\/p>\n No, reported Benton Johnson, Dean R. Hoge, and Donald A. Luidens in their analysis, Mainline Churches: The Real Reason for Decline.<\/a> <\/em>\u00a0\u201cIn our study,\u201d they wrote, \u201cthe single best predictor of church participation turned out to be belief \u2013 orthodox Christian belief, and especially the teaching that a person can be saved only through Jesus Christ.\u201d<\/p>\n The Episcopalians aren\u2019t the only old mainliners vanishing.\u00a0Disappearing at a record rate are the Disciples of Christ \u2013 the liberal branch of the Campbell-Stone Restoration Movement that began on the American frontier during the Second Great Awakening of the early 19th century. That same movement spawned the arch-conservative and militantly locally autonomous Churches of Christ, which remain annoyed with the arch-liberal and shrinking Congregationalists\u00a0who now call themselves\u00a0the\u00a0“United Church of Christ.” The two groups could not be more disimilar.\u00a0<\/p>\n Some of the\u00a0conservative Churches of Christ (which\u00a0as a tenet of faith allow only a capella<\/em> music) and their just as independent Christian Churches (which do allow musical instruments) insist that the word “church” remain lower case in their names — that Christ alone should receive that honor. The\u00a0independent Christian Churches\u00a0decline to organize nationally beyond\u00a0holding their annual North American Christian Convention. Nevertheless, the two conservative groups are growing in numbers while the liberal Disciples are dwindling.<\/p>\n Similar conservative factions are thriving within the Methodists, Congregationalists, Lutherans and Presbyterians. In January, the Orlando Sentinel<\/a><\/em> reported that members of the First Presbyterian Church of Orlando had voted overwhelmingly to break away from the Presbyterian Church (USA) to join the conservative Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC).<\/p>\n \u201cThe 1,759 to 185 vote exceeded the two-thirds majority needed,\u201d reported the Sentinel.<\/em> \u201cThe 3,600-member First Presbyterian is the largest Presbyterian church in Florida and fourth largest in the nation. First Presbyterian has been losing membership in recent years and blamed some of that on PC (USA) doctrines that permitted the ordination of gay deacons, elders and clergy. Some also blamed the decline on doctrines that quest questioned the Bible as the literal word of God and Jesus Christ as the only salvation.\u201d<\/p>\n Unlike the litigious Episcopalians, the Presbyterian Church (USA) released the prestigious congregation \u2013 which is now in the process of formalizing its relationship with the more conservative Evangelical Presbyterian Church.<\/p>\n Why make the switch?\u00a0Local elder Cleat Simmons told the Sentinel <\/em>\u201cThe PC (USA) has turned its back on God and is a denomination dying in the wilderness.\u201d<\/p>\n So, which churches\u00a0are in trouble? According to Gordon-Conwell\u2019s figures, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) have suffered a 56.4 percent loss in membership since 1960. The United Church of Christ (Congregationalist) is down 35.9 percent. The Episcopalians have lost 32.6 percent of their members since 1960. The United Methodist Church is down 23.6 percent and the Presbyterian Church (USA) has lost 21.1 percent of its membership.<\/p>\n That\u2019s 6.2 million people no longer sitting in the old\u00a0mainline pews.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church has swelled from 42.1 million members to 66.4 million since 1960. The Southern Baptists are up 67 percent in the same period, from 9.7 million to 16.2 million.<\/p>\n Significant growth has been seen in two very conservative and traditionally African-American denominations, the Church of God in Christ (reporting 5.5 million members compared to 393,000 in 1960) and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, reporting a 103% increase from 1.9 million to 3.9 million. The Assemblies of God churches report 2.6 million members, compared to 509,000 in 1960.<\/p>\n And the big boom — spawning many of the new and growing megachurches across the countryside — is in the independents. What’s their secret?\u00a0They preach the Bible instead of denying it or explaining it away. They also\u00a0focus on\u00a0energetic outreaches to youth and young adults — and families.<\/p>\n On the other hand, \u201cInstead of attracting a younger, more open-minded demographic with these changes, the Episcopal Church\u2019s dying has proceeded apace,\u201d noted Douthat.\u00a0Their defense, he says\u00a0alternates “between a Monty Python-esque \u2018it\u2019s just a flesh wound!\u2019 bravado and a weird self-righteousness about their looming extinction. (In a 2006 interview, the Episcopal Church\u2019s presiding bishop explained that her communion\u2019s members valued \u2018the stewardship of the earth\u2019 too highly to reproduce themselves.)\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen people leave mainline churches, they go somewhere else,\u201d writes Michael De Groote<\/a> for the Salt Lake City Deseret News<\/em><\/a>. \u201cAs Rodney Stark, a sociologist at Baylor University in Waco, Texas describes it, they are not leaving religion so much as they are looking for religion. About 44 percent of Americans say they have a religious affiliation that is different from the religion in which they were raised, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s \u2018U.S. Religious Landscape Survey.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>