{"id":14,"date":"2010-06-15T16:19:41","date_gmt":"2010-06-15T16:19:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/why-the-conservative-churches-are-shrinking.html"},"modified":"2010-06-15T16:19:41","modified_gmt":"2010-06-15T16:19:41","slug":"why-the-conservative-churches-are-shrinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/why-the-conservative-churches-are-shrinking.html","title":{"rendered":"Why the Conservative Churches Are Shrinking"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"bushel.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/135\/import\/bushel.jpg\" class=\"mt-image-left\" style=\"float: left;margin: 0pt 20px 20px 0pt\" height=\"91\" width=\"127\" \/><\/span>That&#8217;s the question that the Southern Baptist Convention is not wrestling with as it tries to figure out how to jump-start the Great Commission Resurgence during its annual meeting in Orlando. The guys over at Religious Connections offer their characteristically disabused <a href=\"http:\/\/www.baptistplanet.com\/2010\/06\/gcr-passage-wont-change-sbc.html\">take<\/a>, while <i>USA Today<\/i>&#8216;s Cathy Grossman <a href=\"http:\/\/content.usatoday.com\/communities\/Religion\/post\/2010\/06\/sbc-southern-baptist-convention-albert-mohler-great-commission\/1\">wonders<\/a> whether anyone really cares. Her point is that the whole denominational thing is, like Barbara Boxer&#8217;s hair, so yesterday. <\/p>\n<p>After all, the liberal churches are also shrinking, and the moderate churches are shrinking too&#8211;if by churches you mean things like the United Methodist Church and the Episcopal Church USA and the United Church of Christ and the Assemblies of God&#8230;along with the SBC. As the 2008 Trinity American Religious Identification Survey <a href=\"http:\/\/www.americanreligionsurvey-aris.org\/reports\/ARIS_Report_2008.pdf\">shows<\/a>, the only significant growth on the American Christian scene is among those who identify themselves as non-denominational or unspecified Christians&#8211;generic evangelicals, really. Like it or not, SBC, the only way to resurge is to hide your brand under a bushel. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>That&#8217;s the question that the Southern Baptist Convention is not wrestling with as it tries to figure out how to jump-start the Great Commission Resurgence during its annual meeting in Orlando. The guys over at Religious Connections offer their characteristically disabused take, while USA Today&#8216;s Cathy Grossman wonders whether anyone really cares. Her point is&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Why the Conservative Churches Are Shrinking - Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/why-the-conservative-churches-are-shrinking.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why the Conservative Churches Are Shrinking - Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"That&#8217;s the question that the Southern Baptist Convention is not wrestling with as it tries to figure out how to jump-start the Great Commission Resurgence during its annual meeting in Orlando. The guys over at Religious Connections offer their characteristically disabused take, while USA Today&#8216;s Cathy Grossman wonders whether anyone really cares. Her point is&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/why-the-conservative-churches-are-shrinking.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-06-15T16:19:41+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/files\/import\/bushel.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Why the Conservative Churches Are Shrinking - Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/why-the-conservative-churches-are-shrinking.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Why the Conservative Churches Are Shrinking - Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk","og_description":"That&#8217;s the question that the Southern Baptist Convention is not wrestling with as it tries to figure out how to jump-start the Great Commission Resurgence during its annual meeting in Orlando. The guys over at Religious Connections offer their characteristically disabused take, while USA Today&#8216;s Cathy Grossman wonders whether anyone really cares. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}