The Past Is Dead? Time For News Analysis Of America's Scrambled Protestant Marketplace
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(OPINION) Starting with a band of Anglicans landing at Jamestown in 1607 and then Pilgrim dissenters at Plymouth in 1620, various forms of Protestantism collectively dominated what became the United States. That broad cultural hegemony persisted through Revolution, Civil War, Catholic immigration, industrialization, globalization and Protestants’ countless internal squabbles, splits and reunions.
But the Religious Landscape Study from the Pew Research Center tells us the U.S. population is now only 46.6% Protestant. Add to that these newsworthy numbers on Protestantism’s Big Three and we find a scrambled scenario of historic proportions that invites thorough journalistic analysis.
* Last week the Southern Baptist Convention reported its worst-ever decline of 457,371 members from 2021 to 2022 — and of 1.5 million just since 2018 — to the current 13.2 million. The denomination had posted steady gains over a century until recent years.
Oh, here’s a newsroom calendar alert: That slide should roil the Baptists’ important June 13-14 annual meeting in New Orleans, alongside disputes over female pastors and sexual abuse response, and a competitive presidential election.
* The news service of the United Methodist Church, No. 3 in size among U.S. Protestant groups, last week posted tabulation of departures since 2019 of 2,996 conservative congregations, roughly one-tenth of the denomination, with more in process. Most are joining the newborn Global Methodist Church. (Update: This week, Methodist conservatives put dropouts at 3,356 congregations, with another 1,000 or more likely.)
* Meanwhile, other Protestants are gaining. In particular, The Religion Guy has proclaimed the following as 2022’s “Story of the Year.” In November, the latest U.S. Religion Census revealed that independent, nondenominational congregations are now decisively the nation’s largest grouping of Protestants, with 21 million adherents in 44,319 congregations. Most are evangelicals. This relegates the Southern Baptists down to No. 2 in size.
Pew Research defined three categories, evangelical Protestants at 25.4% of Americans, mainline Protestants” at 14.7%, and members of historically Black church groups at 6.5%. (The following analysis sidesteps the important Black situation because we lack good statistics.) Religion writers well know about the increase of religiously unaffiliated “nones” to 22.8% of Americans (per Pew; more recent surveys post higher percentages).
Resulting losses hit hardest at the seven major mainline denominations, known for openness to liberal religious, moral and social thinking. They have suffered unprecedented membership losses since the 1960s. See, for instance, Ryan Burge’s recent Substack column about mainline Presbyterians’ huge shrinkage and this analysis claiming that the Episcopal Church is “dying.”
The United Methodists, also slumping mainliners, dramatize a key change in Protestantism the news media have thus far neglected.
Think this over. As the distinction between mainline and evangelical Protestant groups gradually sharpened since World War II, the mainline denominations still contained important evangelical minorities with thriving local congregations and an impressive brain trust of strategists. The large Methodist walkout dramatizes as never before that those days are fading.
The Guy proposes that reporters dig into the numbers on this outward migration and then consider whether (a la U.S. politics) the decline of mainline evangelicals’ influence is pulling mainline churches from the collapsing center toward a more extreme left, even as an evangelicalism without mainline influence drifts further toward the extreme right.
Also, we can assume Southern Baptist losses reflect the increasing prominence of those nondenominational evangelicals. Journalists could assess the independents’ rising control of the evangelical movement, and also whether lack of old-fashioned denominational constraints fosters sexual and financial scandals and bullying by all-powerful pastors.
Finally, this brings us to one of the year’s most intriguing essays, posted by leading Methodist conservative Mark Tooley. He argues that the devastating “demographic and spiritual collapse” of the mainline is partly responsible for the Christian nationalism that so alarms liberal critics these days.
Like so. Through most of American history, mainline Protestant churches were culturally “paramount” and unified the country around the American democracy they had helped create. That undergirded a broadly biblical yet religiously “generic” consensus on social reforms and mediated political and regional differences.
Starting in the 1960s, however, “mainline elites” became more hostile to “the American experiment,” alienating many weekly worshippers. Without the former unity that the mainline had offered, America became spiritually polarized even as nominal Christians evolved into unaffiliated “nones.”
Yet large numbers embrace the older mainline concept of “a broadly Christian America that is fair and welcoming" to all faiths. Due to the vacuum left by disappearing institutional grounding for the old societal glue, a new nationalism has developed that often employs “harsh and combative rhetoric.”
With the mainline’s collapse, “there are no obvious religious institutions to replace it as a force for national cohesion.” Any news in that? What think?
Richard Ostling is a former religion reporter for The Associated Press and a former correspondent for TIME Magazine. He’s also worked in broadcast TV and radio journalism covering religion and received a lifetime achievement award from Religion News Association. This piece first appeared at GetReligion.org.