Would Evangelicals Prefer A United States With No Mainline Protestants?
(ANALYSIS) I’ve been working on a book project for most of the year. The focus of the manuscript is the idea of religious polarization. Growing up evangelical and becoming a mainline Protestant has given me a really interesting perspective on how people perceive the religious landscape.
For those of you who aren’t aware, mainline Protestants tend to be the more moderate flavor of American Protestant Christianity. Biblical literalism is not pervasive in the mainline — it’s normal to see women in pastoral leadership, and many denominations are affirming to folks in same-sex relationships.
I’ve been a party to a lot of conversations about being mainline over the last 20 years. And sometimes I get the distinct impression that evangelicals really, really don’t like mainline Protestants.
When my church closed down, a few people were very quick to mention that the reason my church had to cease operations was because we were obviously liberal and didn’t preach the true gospel. (Very helpful, by the way. It had a tremendously positive impact on my own mental health).
I can’t remember where I heard this, but a common refrain about five years ago was, “ISIS killed a whole lot more moderate Muslims than any other religious groups.” The thought here is that religious zealots get more heated seeing people not practicing their religion the ‘right way’ than they do seeing apostates adhering to clearly false faith traditions.
I wondered if this idea translated to the evangelical world. So, I tweeted something out one day that was to this effect:
Can survey researchers include a question to evangelicals:
Which scenario would you rather see:
A. 25% of Americans are devout evangelicals. 25% are monthly attending mainline Protestants. 50% are non-religious.B. 25% of Americans are devout evangelicals. 75% are non-religious.
Well, guess what? Dr. Alan Simmons, the research director for the Center for State Policy and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Springfield sent me a DM saying that he might be able to throw it on a survey for me. Sometimes, I really love the internet because now I have the answer to this question.
Okay, first things first. This was only asked to people who self-identified as evangelicals in the prior question. The total sample was 3,212. Of those, 1,219 identified as nonreligious and weren’t asked the evangelical question.
Of the 1,993 who were asked about their evangelical status, 728 said that they were a born-again Christian. That’s my sample size here, and that will come into play throughout this analysis.
After all that preamble, let’s just get to it.
In this sample of self-identified evangelicals, just 14% of them would prefer a world that was either completely evangelical or completely nonreligious with no mainline Protestants to be seen. The overwhelming majority of evangelicals in this survey (86%) said that only having 50% nones would be better than having 75% of the population as nonreligious.
In other words, those evangelical bomb throwers on social media who like to point out the heresy of the mainline do not represent the majority view. In fact, numerically speaking, they represent an incredibly small fringe of evangelicalism.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, click here.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.