The Future of Mainline Protestantism in America 9780231183604, 9780231183611, 9780231545037

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Series Editors’ Introduction: The Future of Religion in America, by Mark Silk and Andrew H. Walsh
Introduction, by James Hudnut-Beumler
1. The State of Contemporary Mainline Protestantism, by Graham Reside
2. The Beliefs and Practices of Mainline Protestants, by David Bains
3. Futures for Mainline Protestant Institutions, by Maria Erling
4. A Divided House, by Daniel Sack
5. The Mainline and the Soul of International Relations, by Andrew H. Walsh
Conclusion: The Quakerization of Mainline Protestantism, by James Hudnut-Beumler
Appendix A: American Religious Identification Survey: Research Design
Appendix B: American Religious Identification Survey: Future of Religion in America Survey
Appendix C: American Religious Identification Survey: Typology of Religious Groups
List of Contributors
Index

Citation preview

T HE FU T U R E OF

MAINLINE PROTEST ANTISM I N A MER IC A E D I T E D BY

James Hudnut-Beumler and Mark Silk

The Future of Mainline Protestantism in America

T HE F U T URE OF RE LIG ION IN AMER ICA

THE F U T U R E OF R E L IG ION IN A M ERICA Series Editors Mark Silk and Andrew H. Walsh The Future of Religion in America is a series of edited volumes on the current state and prospects of the principal religious groupings in the United States. Informed by survey research, the series explores the effect of the significant realignment of the American religious landscape that consolidated in the 1990s, driven by the increasing acceptance of the idea that religious identity is and should be a matter of personal individual choice and not inheritance. The Future of Evangelicalism in America, edited by Candy Gunther Brown and Mark Silk The Future of Mainline Protestantism in America, edited by James Hudnut-Beumler and Mark Silk

THE FUTURE OF MAINLINE PROTESTANTISM IN AMERICA EDITED BY

James Hudnut-Beumler and Mark Silk

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia .edu Copyright © 2018 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hudnut-Beumler, James David, editor. Title: The future of mainline Protestantism in America / edited by James Hudnut-Beumler and Mark Silk. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2018. | Series: The future of religion in America | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017031097 | ISBN 9780231183604 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231183611 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231545037 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: United States—Church history—21st century. | Protestantism— United States. | Protestantism—21st century. Classification: LCC BR526 .F88 2018 | DDC 280/.4097309051—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017031097 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design and illustration: Lisa Hamm

Contents

Series Editors’ Introduction: The Future of Religion in America Mark Silk and Andrew H. Walsh vii Introduction James Hudnut-Beumler 1 1.

The State of Contemporary Mainline Protestantism Graham Reside 17

2.

The Beliefs and Practices of Mainline Protestants David Bains 59

3.

Futures for Mainline Protestant Institutions Maria Erling 83

4. A Divided House Daniel Sack 106 5.

The Mainline and the Soul of International Relations Andrew H. Walsh 139 Conclusion: The Quakerization of Mainline Protestantism James Hudnut-Beumler 175

vi Con t en t s

Appendix A: American Religious Identification Survey: Research Design 199 Appendix B: American Religious Identification Survey: Future of Religion in America Survey 203 Appendix C: American Religious Identification Survey: Typology of Religious Groups 207 List of Contributors Index

215

213

Series Editors’ Introduction TH E F UT URE OF REL IGION IN A M E R IC A

Mark Silk and Andrew H. Walsh

What is the future of religion in America? Not too good, to judge by recent survey data. Between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of adults who said they had no religion—the so-called Nones—increased from the middle single digits to over 20 percent, a startling rise and one that was disproportionately found among the rising “millennial” generation. If the millennials remain as they are, and the generation after them follows their lead, onethird of Americans will be Nones before long. To be sure, there are no guarantees that this will happen; it has long been the case that Americans tend to disconnect from organized religion in their twenties then re-affiliate when they marry and have children. It is also important to recognize that those who say they have no religion are not saying that they have no religious beliefs or engage in no religious behavior. Most Nones in fact claim to believe in God, and many engage in a variety of religious practices, including prayer and worship attendance. Meanwhile, nearly four in five Americans continue to identify with a religious body or tradition—Christian for the most part but also Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Baha’i, Wiccan, New Age, and more. How have these various traditions changed? Which have grown and which declined? What sorts of beliefs and practices have Americans gravitated toward and which have they moved away from? How have religious impulses and movements affected public policy and the culture at large? If we are to project the future of religion in America, we need to know where it is today and the trajectory it took to get there. Unfortunately, that knowledge is not easy to come by. For nearly half a century, the historians who are supposed to tell the story of religion in

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America have shied away from bringing it past the 1960s. One reason for this has been their desire to distance themselves from a scholarly heritage they believe to have been excessively devoted to Protestant identities, perspectives, and agendas. Placing Protestantism at the center of the story has seemed like an act of illegitimate cultural hegemony in a society as religiously diverse as the United States has become over the past half century. “Textbook narratives that attempt to tell the ‘whole story’ of U.S. religious history have focused disproportionately on male, northeastern, AngloSaxon, mainline Protestants and their beliefs, institutions, and power,” Thomas A. Tweed wrote in 1997, in a characteristic dismissal. Indeed, any attempt to construct a “master narrative” of the whole story has been deemed an inherently misleading form of historical discourse. In recent decades, much of the best historical writing about religion in America has steered clear of summary accounts altogether, offering instead tightly focused ethnographies, studies based on gender and race analysis, meditations on consumer culture, and monographs on immigrants and outsiders and their distinctive perspectives on the larger society. Multiplicity has been its watchword. But as valuable as the multiplicity approach has been in shining a light on hitherto overlooked parts of the American religious landscape, it can be just as misleading as triumphalist Protestantism. To take one prominent example, in 2001 Diana Eck’s A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation called for an end to conceptualizing the United States as in some sense Christian. Because of the 1965 immigration law, members of world religions were now here in strength, Eck (correctly) claimed. What she avoided discussing, however, was the relative weight of the world religions in society as a whole. As it turns out, although twenty-first-century America counts millions of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, Taoists, and adherents of other world religions in its population, they total less than 5 percent of the population. Moreover, Eck omitted to note that the large majority of post-1965 immigrants have been Christian—for the most part Roman Catholics. Overall, close to three-quarters of Americans still identify as Christians of one sort or another. While there is no doubt that the story of religion in America must account for the growth of religious diversity, since the 1970s substantial changes have taken place that have nothing to do with it. There is, we believe, no substitute for comprehensive narratives that describe and assess

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how religious identity has changed and what the developments in the major religious institutions and traditions have been—and where they are headed. That is what the Future of Religion in America series seeks to provide. For the series, teams of experts have been asked to place the tradition they study in the contemporary American context, understood in quantitative as well as qualitative terms. The appropriate place to begin remapping the religious landscape is with demographic data on changing religious identity. Advances in survey research now provide scholars with ample information about both the total national population and its constituent parts (by religious tradition, gender, age, region, race and ethnicity, education, and so on). As a resource for the series, the Lilly Endowment funded the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey, the third in a series of comparable, very large random surveys of religious identity in the United States. With data points in 1990, 2001, and 2008, the ARIS series provided robust and reliable data on American religious change over time down to the state level that is capable of capturing the demography of the twenty largest American religious groups. Based on interviews with 54,000 subjects, ARIS 2008 has equipped our project to assess in detail the dramatic changes that have occurred over the past several decades in American religious life and to suggest major trends that organized religion faces in the coming decades. It has also allowed us to equip specialists in particular traditions to consider the broader connections and national contexts in which their subjects “do religion.” The ARIS series suggests that a major reconfiguration of American religious life has taken place over the past quarter-century. Although signs of this reconfiguration were evident as early as the 1960s, not until the 1990s did they consolidate into a new pattern—one characterized by three salient phenomena. First, the large-scale and continuing immigration inaugurated by the 1965 immigration law not only introduced significant populations of adherents of world religions hitherto little represented in the United States but also, and more significantly, changed the face of American Christianity. Perhaps the most striking impact has been on the ethnic and geographical rearrangement of American Catholicism. There have been steep declines in Catholic affiliation in the Northeast and rapid growth in the South and West, thanks in large part to an increase in the population of Latinos, who currently constitute roughly one-third of the American Catholic population. California now has a higher proportion of

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Catholics than New England, which, since the middle of the nineteenth century, had been by far the most Catholic region of the country. A second major phenomenon is the realignment of non-Catholic Christians. As recently as 1960, half of all Americans identified with mainline Protestant denominations–Congregationalist, Disciples of Christ, Episcopalian, Lutheran, Methodist, and Northern Baptist. Since then, and especially since 1980, such identification has undergone a steep decline, and by 2015 was approaching 10 percent of the population. The weakening of the mainline is further revealed by the shrinkage of those simply identifying as “Protestant” from 17.2 million in 1990 to 5.2 million in 2008, reflecting the movement of loosely tied mainline Protestants away from any institutional religious identification. By contrast, over the same period those who identify as just “Christian” or “non-denominational Christian” more than doubled their share of the population, from 5 to 10.7 percent. Based on current demographic trends, these people, who tend to be associated with mega-churches and other non-denominational evangelical bodies, will soon equal the number of mainliners. In most parts of the country, adherents of Evangelicalism now outnumber mainliners by at least two to one in most parts of the country, making it the normative form of nonCatholic American Christianity. Simply put, American Protestantism is no longer the “two-party system” that historian Martin Marty identified a generation ago. The third phenomenon is the rise of the Nones. Their prevalence varies from region to geographic region, with the Pacific Northwest and New England at the high end and the South and Midwest at the low. Americans of Asian, Jewish, and Irish background are particularly likely to identify as Nones. Likewise, Nones are disproportionately male and younger than those who claim a religious identity. But there is no region, no racial or ethnic group, no age or gender cohort that has not experienced a substantial increase in the proportion of those who say they have no religion. It is a truly national phenomenon, and one that is at the same time more significant and less significant than it appears. It is less significant because it implies that religious belief and behavior in America have declined to the same extent as religious identification, and that is simply not the case. But that very fact makes it more significant because it indicates that the rise of the Nones has at least as much to do with a change in the way Americans understand religious identity as it does with a disengagement from reli-

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gion. In a word, there has been a shift away from understanding one’s religious identity as inherited or “ascribed” and toward seeing it as something that individuals choose for themselves. This shift has huge implications for all religious groups in the country, as well as for American civil society as a whole. In order to make sense of it, some historical context is necessary. During the colonial period, the state church model dominated American religious life. There were growing pressures to accommodate religious dissent, especially in the Middle Atlantic region, a hotbed of sectarian diversity. But there wasn’t much of a free market for religion in the colonial period because religious identity was closely connected to particular ethnic or immigrant identities: the Presbyterianism of the Scots-Irish; the Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Anabaptism of various groups of Pennsylvania Germans; the Judaism of the Sephardic communities in Eastern seaboard cities; the Roman Catholicism of Maryland’s English founding families. The emergence of revivalism in the late eighteenth century and the movement to terminate state establishments after the Revolution cut across this tradition of inherited religious identity. Different as they were, evangelical Protestants and Enlightenment deists—the coalition that elected Thomas Jefferson president—could together embrace disestablishment, toleration, and the primacy of individual religious conscience and choice. This introduced amazing diversity and religious change in the early nineteenth century, in what came to be known as the Second Great Awakening. Within a few decades, however, ascribed religious identity was back in the ascendancy. By the 1830s, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Disciples, and Episcopalians were establishing cultural networks—including denominational schools and colleges, mission organizations, and voluntary societies—within which committed families intermarried and built multigenerational religious identities. The onset of massive migration from Europe in the 1840s strengthened the salience of ascribed religious identity, creating new, inward-looking communities as well as a deep and contentious division between the largely Roman Catholic immigrants and the Protestant “natives.” Moderate and liberal Protestant denominations moved away from revivalism and sought self-perpetuation by “growing their own” members in families, Sunday Schools, and other denominational institutions. Religion as a dimension of relatively stable group identities persisted into the middle of the twentieth century; indeed, after World War II, sociologists saw it as a key foundation

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of the American way. Will Herberg famously argued that the American people were divided into permanent pools of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, with little intermarriage. Yet by the end of the 1960s, it was clear that the century-long dominance of ascribed religious identity was under challenge. Interfaith marriage had become more common as barriers of prejudice and discrimination fell; secularization made religion seem optional to many people; and internal migration shook up established communities and living patterns. In addition, conversion-oriented evangelical Protestantism was dramatically reviving, with an appeal based on individuals making personal decisions to follow Jesus. At the same time, a new generation of spiritual seekers was exploring religious frontiers beyond Judaism and Christianity. As at the end of the eighteenth century, evangelicals and post-Judeo-Christians together pushed Americans to reconceptualize religion as a matter of individual choice. By the 1990s, survey research indicated that religious bodies that staked their claims on ascribed identity—mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics above all, but also such ethno-religious groupings as Lutherans, Jews, and Eastern Orthodox—were suffering far greater loss of membership than communities committed to the view that religion is something you choose for yourself (evangelicals, religious liberals, and the “spiritual but not religious” folk we call metaphysicals). Within the religious communities that have depended on ascription, that news has been slow to penetrate. The bottom line for the future of religion in America is that all religious groups are under pressure to adapt to a society where religious identity is increasingly seen as a matter of personal choice. Ascription won’t disappear, but there is little doubt that it will play a significantly smaller role in the formation of Americans’ religious identity. This is important information, not least because it affects various religious groups in profoundly different ways. It poses a particular challenge for those groups that have depended on ascribed identity to guarantee their numbers, challenging them to develop not only new means of keeping and attracting members but also new ways of conceptualizing and communicating who and what they are. Preeminent among such groups are the Jews, whose conception of religious identity has always been linked to parentage; only converts are known as “Jews by choice.” If to a lesser degree, Catholics and Mormons have historically been able to depend on ascriptive identity to keep their flocks in the fold. But in a world of choice, American Catholicism has

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increasingly had to depend on new Latino immigrants to keep its numbers up, while the LDS church, focused more and more on converts from beyond the Mountain West, has had to change its ways to accommodate “Mormons by choice.” In the wide perspective, what choice has done is to substantially weaken the middle ground between the extremes of religious commitment and indifference. With the option of “None” before them as an available category of identity, many Americans no longer feel the need to keep up the moderate degree of commitment that once assured that pews would be occupied on Sunday mornings. American society has become religiously bifurcated— a bifurcation signaled by political partisanship. Since the 1970s, the Republican Party has increasingly become the party of the more religious; the Democratic Party, the party of the less religious. In order to take account of this growing divide between the religious and the secular, the narrative of religion in America must thus go beyond both the Protestant hegemony story and the multiplicity story. The new understanding of religious identity as chosen, in a society where None is increasingly accepted as a legitimate choice, stands at the center of the narrative this series will construct. AC K NOW L E D G M E N T S

The Greenberg Center wishes to acknowledge several people and institutions that provided critical support for the Future of Religion in America project. Lilly Endowment, Inc. funded the American Religious Identity Survey (ARIS) of 2008, which provided the data that shaped both the overall project and its volumes. Lilly also generously underwrote the first four volumes of the series, on evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, Roman Catholics, and African American religion, as well as the companion surveys designed by each of those volume teams. Our distinguished Trinity College colleagues at the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture, Barry Kosmin and Ariel Keysar, enabled the project by conducting ARIS and its small companions. The center, now celebrating its twentieth anniversary, owes a great deal to Leonard E. Greenberg, Trinity Class of 1948, for generous and continuing support of the center’s work.

The Future of Mainline Protestantism in America

Introduction James Hudnut-Beumler

Is American mainline Protestantism a relic of a bygone era, the religious equivalent of Howard Johnson’s Restaurants or Sears, a former giant now fighting for cultural relevance? Perhaps not, but this volume seeks to assess what will remain of a formerly central religious legacy in the future. Past observers have conceptualized American mainline Protestantism in various ways. It has been viewed as the de facto soul of a nation, motivating presidents like Lincoln, Wilson, and Eisenhower. Others have depicted it as a cluster of denominations descended from Europe that rose to corporate significance in the late nineteenth century, only to lose pride of place to evangelical Christians by the end of the twentieth century. Some have portrayed it as the engine of philanthropy and human rights; others have seen the last vestiges of an established class system. Today when mainline Protestantism is under discussion by historians and sociologists, the notion of denominational decline is almost inevitably invoked. Mainline Protestant decline is real. In 1958, 52 out of every 100 Americans were affiliated with a mainline Protestant denomination. Presidents, congressional leaders, business leaders, and jurists came overwhelmingly from this religious subculture.1 It is difficult today to appreciate how institutionally powerful the mainline was in the middle decades of the twentieth century, and the comparable affiliation statistic is that just 13 percent of Americans are members of mainline Protestant bodies. In the light of this fourfold decline in demographic significance over 55 years, this book introduces the thesis of the “Quakerization” of American mainline Protestantism. In this process, a group of denominations once at the center of the culture—one that assumed a supervisory and establishmentarian

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position in American society at large—has moved to the periphery. Indeed, what Martin Marty described as the “two-party system” of American Protestantism (featuring a Protestant house neatly divided between liberal and conservative “parties”) has turned into, if not a one-party system, one in which the mainline has become the niche player and the evangelicals have taken the more central role. Maybe a death notice for mainline Protestantism is premature. All three of the leading Democratic candidates for president in the 2008 U.S. election were affiliated with mainline denominations, as were both major parties’ nominees in 2016. And in congregations across the country millions of other people still associate with the mainline for reasons that are anything but located in the past or preoccupied by decline. At theological schools across the United States new generations of leaders prepare themselves, not to prop up religious institutions out of old brand loyalties but rather due to their own spiritual beliefs and moral convictions. Yet a closer look at congregations and seminaries reveals areas of concern. Well more than half of all mainline Protestants attend very large membership congregations, but the overwhelming majority of seminarians will spend their ministries serving churches with fewer than 150 members. While smaller churches are becoming smaller at an alarming rate, the number of people who claim affiliation as “Protestant,” or “Episcopal,” or “Presbyterian,” which had well exceeded official enrolled memberships, has also begun to shrink in recent surveys. If mainline Protestantism is not dead, neither is it thriving. This book has been in the works long enough for a joke about it to get old. When colleagues ask what I’m working on, I have replied that I’m editing a book on the future of mainline Protestantism. The reply to this statement is invariably some version of “I didn’t know it had a future.” Indeed, the one thing that people seem to think about American mainline Protestantism in the second decade of the twenty-first century is that it is in decline. The historian Martin Marty commented in July 2013 that the terms “mainline” and “decline” went together like no other religious term and “decline” when it came to Google search hits. Though Marty did note that “decline” was catching to some other binary religious terms as well (e.g., Southern Baptist and Roman Catholic), thinking about mainline Protestantism losing its “mainline” or establishment status goes back at

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least to 1959 and Marty’s own The New Shape of American Religion, in which he foresaw the broadening of acceptable religious identities in the 1960s and beyond.2 Since then, authors have been producing books greeting the changing status of the one-time de facto religious establishment with remorse, glee, blame, or hope. Whether one wanted to praise or bury mainline Protestantism had a lot to do with the kind of book that got written for this genre of declension books. W HO ARE THE M AINLINE PROT ES TANT S ?

The term “mainline Protestantism” tends to elicit diagnostic interventions from just about everyone. A Catholic commentator, Joseph Bottum, offers a grim prospect for mainline Protestantism, writing, “The death of Mainline is the central historical fact of our time: the event that distinguishes the past several decades from every other period in American history.”3 Like Nietzsche’s God, mainline Protestantism, Bottum suggests, is dead. Others might be inclined to counter such claims with words from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: it’s “not quite dead.” While mainline Protestantism’s defenders are more sanguine about its prognosis, no astute observer denies that the patient has seen better days. Religious people especially have a stake in its prognosis, but almost everyone has an opinion about the status and future of the mainline. For some, mainline Protestantism indicates a decaying religious body, for others an aging but still strong cultural warrior. For some it represents a remnant of the true faith—a kind of enlightened religion in an increasingly benighted world. For others, it is the moral conscience of the nation and the incubator of its greatest institutions and leaders. It is one birthplace of civil rights and antiwar movements and represents the religious wing of the feminist, gay rights and the green movements. And for still others it designates a losing brand in the rough and tumble of America’s religious marketplace. It is a bygone religion, best relegated to museums and libraries. The term “mainline Protestantism” is a loaded and, admittedly, expansive one. At the same time, much of what we think we know about mainline Protestantism is based either in ideology or mythology, and often reflects inaccurate or outdated data. In fact, one of the interesting facts about mainline Protestantism is that is has quietly become a relatively understudied and

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thus misunderstood aspect of the religious landscape in the United States. At least since the 1970s, the growth of Evangelicalism on the one hand and the growing presence of non-Christian religions on the other has focused attention elsewhere. The title of Diana Eck’s book, A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation, nicely captures the ascendant assumption about religion in America—that Protestant hegemony has given way to religious pluralism. 4 The old (Protestant) God has died. Long live the new gods. And the major story line of mainline Protestantism that most people know—that it is a religion in decline— seems to confirm this sense. What does this all mean for the future of mainline Protestantism? Has the term itself become a misnomer? Have its denominations been supplanted as the anchors of religion in America? Or is it still a vibrant and relevant, if now decentered, form of religious expression and organization? In other words, does it still matter, and if so, how? In this introduction and the following chapters we seek to provide the data that can help make more informed judgments about these questions and others, and to offer a portrait of the mainline as it is today, both in relationship to its own history and in relationship to the other religious groups that populate the American religious landscape. We seek to describe who mainline Protestants are at the beginning of the twenty-first century. How many are there? Where do they live? What do they believe, and how do they practice their religion today? What are the challenges they face, and what are the opportunities before them? These are pressing questions, not just for mainline Protestants but for anyone who wants to understand religion in America. And fortunately, over the past decade there have been several important national surveys that recast light on the mainline, and whose results are sometimes surprising. This volume utilizes some of these studies to portray a more accurate and robust account of the state of mainline Protestantism in America today and give some indication of its future possibilities. DE FINING TE RMS

In order to describe any social reality, it is important to be clear about the subject under consideration, and since the term “mainline Protestantism” is a capacious one, it is expedient to begin with a definition of terms.

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MAINLINE

The adjective “mainline” specifies a particular branch of American Protestantism in contradistinction to evangelical Protestantism especially but also to African American and other more sectarian forms of Protestant Christianity in the United States. Surprisingly, the term “mainline” as an indicator of religious identity is relatively new, only becoming part of religious discourse in the 1960s.5 The term finds its origins in the Pennsylvania mainline, a collection of upscale towns that lined the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Main Line, running from the center of Philadelphia outward along the Northwest corridor. Home to some of the wealthiest families in America, these towns were associated with the country’s elite white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) establishment. These suburban towns each had their well-appointed, tall-steeple churches where this culture was weekly displayed. The term “mainline,” then, was first used to indicate both the historic genealogy and the cultural prominence of the religious forms of East Coast social elites, distinguished from the more evangelical and sectarian piety of the lower classes. It was extended by analogy from Philadelphia’s elite to the national stage, effectively designating the religion of America’s Establishment class. In an important sense, then, mainline described the “high church” Protestantism that had come to characterize upper-middle-class religion in the 1950s in contradistinction to other forms of Protestantism in America. In 1989, the historian William Hutchison referred to the largest mainline denominations as the seven sisters: His list referenced the denominations now known as the American Baptist Churches USA, the Christian Church / Disciples of Christ, the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church (USA), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the United Methodist Church, and the Presbyterian Church (USA).6 We would add another large denomination, the Reformed Church of America. Other scholars’ more expansive lists include smaller groups who share a similar history and sense of cultural significance such as the Quakers, the Unitarian Universalists, and other smaller denominations. However, Hutchison’s seven sisters plus the Reformed Church in America capture the major denominations within the Protestant mainline and provide a serviceable list without including groups who may not wish to be counted as part of the Protestant family theologically. Indeed, the vast majority of those who

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identify themselves as mainline Protestants also identify themselves with one of Hutchison’s denominations, so while Hutchison’s list, plus one, is not exhaustive, it is comprehensive.

P R O T E S TA N T

From its first usage, mainline qualified Protestant. The term “Protestant” has its origins in the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation and its challenges to the Roman Catholic Church. Now recognized as one of the principal branches of Christianity, along with Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, Protestantism’s defining features include a commitment to the doctrines of sola scriptura (the Bible is the ultimate source of religious authority), sole fides (faith is the sole sufficient means of salvation), and the priesthood of all believers, or the notion that each individual, through the work of Christ, has direct access to God without the necessity of institutional mediation. In other words, for Protestants, God is equally accessible to all the faithful. As Max Weber famously observed, an important consequence of this principle is that every believer has a religious vocation in the world. This doctrine stood in opposition to the perceived Catholic notion of a spiritual hierarchy, with its division between secular roles and religious vocations. According to Weber, Protestantism injected a religious motivation and vitality into all of human endeavors, effectively sacralizing the secular and providing the cultural engine for modernity. The theological convictions of the Reformers thus eventuated in what theologian Paul Tillich referred to as the Protestant principle, and what Weber called the Protestant ethic—a pervasive cultural orientation elevating the individual in the drama of salvation and refiguring religious and social membership in terms of achievement rather than ascription. As Weber noted, this cultural orientation found its fullest expression in the United States, which has been profoundly shaped by the moral and theological consequences of the Protestant ethos.

DENOMINATION

The term “denomination” indicates a form of organization that is particularly characteristic of religion in the United States. First used in the seventeenth century by dissenting Protestant clergy in England wanting to

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distinguish themselves both from the state church and from its anti-statist critics, who were dismissed as “sectarians,” denomination indicated a middle way, signaling both distance from the state church and a continued loyalty to the monarchy. Thus, in 1702, a group of Presbyterian, Baptist, and Congregationalist clergy formed what they called “the body of dissenting ministers of the three denominations in and about the city of London.”7 This notion of denomination was carried to America and became the organizing principle for religion here, becoming effectively institutionalized in the First Amendment of the Constitution. Denominationalism represented freedom from state governance but not an antipathy toward the state. It promised partnership rather than antagonism. 8 A V E RY BRIE F HISTORY OF DENOMI NAT IONS IN AM E RIC A

In their earliest incarnations in America, denominations served as loose confederacies of congregations. Their primary purpose was to provide continuity with the forms of religious life in the originating countries. Over time, however, as the denominations themselves became nationalized, they began to take on more functions.9 The modern denominational form was born with the rise of religious voluntary societies in the early part of the nineteenth century. During this period a host of groups arose to address relevant social and religious issues that were going otherwise unmet. Prohibition, antislavery, home and foreign mission, and tract and bible societies all emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century. This religiously organized voluntarism contained both a strong moral imperative for social uplift and a general reluctance to depend on the state to address the pressing social challenges of the day. Over time, as these voluntary societies were consolidated under the domain of denominations, they gave national denominational offices a more substantive role in the religious life of the nation and invited greater cooperation across denominational lines, a dynamic that would come to characterize much of mainline Protestantism in the twentieth century, eventuating in the ecumenical movement. Over time, the process of bureaucratization brought the various voluntary societies under central control, and by the turn of the twentieth century, the denominations had brought the various publishing houses, mission boards, temperance

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societies, and other efforts at social uplift under their national umbrellas. Thus, through the nineteenth century, denominations evolved from loose confederations of congregations into bureaucratic organizations that served missions beyond the scope of any one congregation or single regional agency. The bureaucratic denominational structure mirrored the developing bureaucratic state. And just as the second half of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century saw the dynamic growth of the state, so, too, has it seen the consolidation and growth of denominations. The result, according to Craig Dykstra and James Hudnut-Beumler, was that “by 1900, for both practical and ideological reasons, the die had been cast for a corporate bureaucratic form of organization that would characterize American Protestantism at the national level for most of the [twentieth] century.”10 Denominationalism as a form of organization represents, then, a relatively open religious system, even as denominational development in the United States has led to large bureaucracies that have tended toward institutional isomorphism. Indeed, it is one of the ironies of denominationalism that it promotes both religious diversity, insofar as it refuses monopolization of any one group, and institutional convergence, as denominations tend to mirror one another, first in form and then in content. But the emergence of national denominations in the United States is not the full story. With the declining resources and loss of membership of recent decades, mainline denominations have seen another development. Dykstra and Hudnut-Beumler describe the morphing of the programmatic organization of the early twentieth century into the regulatory denominational model of today. When, due to shrinking resources and increased competition, the denominational offices started to shed their various programmatic offerings, they focused more on matters of adjudication over the allocation of resources, and to managing issues of governance and the regulation of their constituents. This development was a reaction, in part, to the diminishing capacities to do other, more substantive programming. Dykstra and Hudnut-Beumler note that “the shift has taken place through a slow accumulation of regulatory activity in a context of both the retrenchment of the corporation and the absence of a compelling constructive alternative.”11 In other words, with nothing else to do, denominational officers began to spend their time doing the only work left to them: the thankless job of regulation and the allocation of ever scarcer resources.12

9 In t rod u c t i on

M E RG E RS AND AC QUIS I T IONS

Partly in reaction to the loss of resources, the 1950s and 60s were a period of ecumenism in mainline denominationalism. This period especially was a time of mergers and federations of previously distinct denominations. Part of this dynamic was the reconciliation of denominations that had split during the Civil War. The New England Congregationalists joined forces with the Midwestern German Calvinists to forge the United Church of Christ, and the Anglo-Saxon-heritage Methodists joined with the German-origin Evangelical United Brethren to make up the United Methodist Church. Several ethnic Lutheran denominations also came together to make the ELCA. In this ecumenical spirit of organizational consolidation, there was an increase in cooperation, but there was also a decline in distinctiveness, as mergers created a more general “mainline denominational” identity. The sociologist R. Stephen Warner suggests that these tectonic shifts led to a condition where “it became easier to recognize mainline Protestant leaders by their opinions on public affairs than by their theology, and it became difficult to discern what, other than a common label, connected the various leadership cadres to the grassroots.”13 Even as the mainline denominations became defined more singularly as regulatory agencies, they declined in their power as social actors. In a landmark study, The Restructuring of American Religion, Robert Wuthnow argues that “special purpose groups” stepped in to do the work that denominational officials used to do, especially in areas of public concern.14 And the 1980s especially saw a rapid proliferation of these various lobbying and special interest groups. This restructuring along the lines of narrower interests has meant that the denominations have become less internally coherent, and more internally fractured, especially along cultural lines. According to Wuthnow, this is part of a broader societal shift, but it has led to what he calls a declining significance of denominations for public debate. Methodists, for example, no longer need to struggle to arrive at denominational consensus, even if they could, because every faction within can find a special interest group to further their ends and to give them voice. Whatever the issue, in mainline denominations today it seems that every side has a platform and an advocate, even its own magazine or website. This fact may, Wuthnow suggests, have the effect of fracturing and thereby reducing the power of mainline public witness. Are Presbyterians (or Methodists, or

10 In t rod u c t i on

Episcopalians, etc.) for or against the war in Iraq? Gay marriage? Abortion? The answer is both: on these and a range of other social and moral issues, mainline Protestants are divided, and the denominations are unable to speak with one voice. While denominational officials still make pronouncements, no one any longer imagines that they speak for the people who sit in the pews. L E S S ON S DRAW N F R OM A N E T Y MOLO G IC A L JOURNEY

The etymology of the operative terms “mainline,” “Protestant,” and “denomination” leads us to three themes worth noting, in order to better understand the nature of contemporary mainline Protestantism. First, as the story of its origins reminds us, “mainline” should not be confused with the notion of the majority religion—it has never simply indicated the religion of the plurality of Americans. If this were the case, Catholicism would have been described as the mainline since at least early last century. Nor does it indicate the mainstream of Christian belief and practice. If this were the case, Evangelicalism more justifiably would be the mainstream religion in America. Rather, the term designates a particular segment of a broader religious landscape, indicating a particular cultural style and position. It began as the religion of the custodial classes. It has been the religion of the establishment. Thus, a denomination is mainline not because of the size of its membership, or because of the representativeness of its belief and practice, but because of the particular social location it holds, because of the nature of its cultural self-understanding, and because of the social work it does. It has served, in other words, as religion of the priestly class in America’s Protestant culture, giving content and organizational form to a common religio-cultural ethos.15 In their history, mainline Protestants have done this work through pronouncements and direct civic engagement, but also through the ritualization of the life course, through moral edification in sermons and instruction through Sunday school lessons, as well as by their social and political collaborations with one another. They have served as important sources for civic norms and values with a history of inculcating both love of country and prophetic critique of it in their members. In short, mainline Protestants have been denominational and not sectarian. Indeed,

11 In t rod u c t i on

they are the “other” against which sectarians have sought to distinguish themselves. A second lesson is that in America denominationalism is the operative form of religious organization. Here, all religions are denominations, including traditions that have no such concept in their nations of origin. In America, Judaism is divided into denominations—Orthodox, Reformed, Conservative, and Reconstruction—and Buddhists, Hindus, Catholics, and others find themselves fitting into the denominational frame. So, too, is Islam conceived as but another denomination on the American landscape. Ironically, perhaps, even when a group resists the denominational label, it finds itself unable to escape it. Non-denominational Christians thus have been conceived as just another denominational group, as are those who describe themselves as “unaffiliated” who are described by sociologists as the denomination of the Nones. In America, it seems, you don’t have to go to church or even believe in God, but you do have to belong to a denomination of one sort or another. So the United States is a denominational society. Yet there is a deep ambiguity here as well. Sociologist Robert Wuthnow has described the declining significance of denominationalism as a constitutive feature of a restructured religious environment in the United States and describes, in its stead, a de facto congregationalism as the more relevant category of religious organization.16 Certainly, at one level this is true. People are much quicker to switch denominations than in the past, with brand loyalty on the decline.17 And as indicated above, mainline denominations now exhibit more external similarity and internal differences. As a result they have become less powerful as agents of social intervention and cohesion. Surveys confirm that as they have lost ethnic and theological distinctiveness, denominations are becoming less salient in people’s own religious self-understanding. At the same time, however, denominationalism remains the deep structuring principle of religious organization in the United States. And despite the many mergers and the ecumenical impulses and institutional isomorphism that obtain, mainline denominations still represent deeply embedded cultures. Especially relative to newer forms of Christianity in America, the mainline denominations boast long histories, often tracing their heritage back not only to the colonial period but before. The English Episcopalians, the Scottish Presbyterians, the Scandinavian and German

12 In t rod u c t i on

Lutherans, and the English and Welsh Methodists all boast deep roots connecting their members to a longer chain of memory, which cannot be easily dissolved into the localism of the congregation. THE F UTURE OF THE M AINLINE T R ADI T IONS

This volume is not just another book on mainline Protestant decline. To be sure, the authors each recognize the membership losses and cultural eclipse of mainline Protestantism’s central status in American society as accomplished facts. Still, as far as the mainline churches have fallen over the last half-century—from being the religious home of more than half the adult population—they still are the spiritual homes for millions of Americans. Moreover, these traditions have bequeathed to American life countless institutions (colleges, hospitals, charitable organizations) and ideas (elective representative democracy, realism in international affairs, and the duty to decline to follow an unjust order from a superior officer) that continue to play constitutive roles in American society. The authors of the essays in this volume take mainline Protestantism, its people, and its institutions—even its legacies—now, as they are, and explore what will become of them in the future. So does mainline Protestantism in America have a future? Yes, the authors of this volume agree that it does. But there is no return to the golden age of the 1950s, and the authors’ essays help explain why. The psychology of decline itself probably affects these groups and their leaders more than it would religious groups and leaders that have never known social prominence. The generation of churchgoers who remember being the well-regarded normative center of their communities is rapidly dying off, however, and most religious leaders 60 years and younger joined the mainline cause after cultural dislocation was writing on the wall for the churches they would serve. These younger leaders never expected to be wildly popular or have bigger and bigger ministries, as those before them did (or as their evangelical contemporaries could expect). So we are coming to a time when lowered expectations and the perennial hope to make a difference with one’s life before God and in community are rebalancing for the mainline churches, even as the age of their average member is high and continues to climb. What will the future look like for mainline Protestants? Without pre-

13 In t rod u c t i on

empting the chapters’ authors’ reasoning, we can offer some teasers as to the changing shape of the mainline Protestant future: y When it comes to worship, the much-heralded differences between mainline worship and evangelical Protestant worship will disappear as mainline styles and evangelical styles converge with bands, projectors, choirs, organs, praise songs, and traditional hymns being found on both sides of the evangelical-mainline divide. Indeed, David Bains asks at what point the modes of worship are so similar that it makes sense to talk about a new, enlarged mainline Christian experience of church life. y Though the mainline Protestants will continue to host the most liberal expressions of organized Christianity in their churches, the substantial evangelical wing in each denomination and the relatively older demographic makeup of these denominations will virtually ensure that while they hold positions on social issues that are more liberal than conservative Christian groups, those positions will themselves be viewed as too conservative to many younger, more secular Americans. y Far from being an American political left at prayer, the mainline Protestant churches will continue to be distinct for numbering near equal numbers of Republicans, Democrats, and independents for years to come. This blend makes any attempt to politicize mainline Protestantism fraught with difficulties, but it also makes the churches and their dominations one of the few big tent organizations in twenty-first-century America that comprehends people across age and ideological lines. y The institutional shake-out of mainline institutions will continue apace, but the church-related seminaries, colleges, camps, and even denominations themselves that survive best will be the ones that have their own money and raisons d’être that link them to independent sources of support. Yesterday’s winners (e.g., Lutheran and United Methodist seminaries accustomed to direct budget support from their denominations) may be hurt the most, while schools with adequate endowments thrive. y Some congregations will continue to thrive in the mainline, and very few will actually close. Congregations after all are hard to kill, given their extremely local and personal constituencies. At the same time, the mission projects, educational curricula, and the identities of congregations

14 In t rod u c t i on

large and small will become matters of local choice and come at the expense of denominational organizations that will be poorly funded and not in a position to provide even badly needed help. y When mainline Protestants fight over social issues, and especially the so-called identity issues in their midst, they will both participate in an exercise of church self-definition and please none of their members entirely because of the broad range of faith, practice, politics, and experience their denominational families comprehend. On a good day, you can see the reign of God from a mainline church conflict. On a bad day, you might envy the groupthink of an independent evangelical mega-church. The plan of this book is to begin like others in the Columbia series on the Future of Religion in America, with chapters on mainline Protestant demographics, beliefs, practices, and characteristic modes of worship. Then, because of the long history of creating significant institutions and present difficulties in maintaining these institutions and a public identity in the midst of conflict, chapters are dedicated to the future of mainline Protestant institutions, conflict in mainline Protestantism, and the changing tenor of the mainline voice in public affairs. A concluding essay provides a final synthesis of what we believe lies ahead for American mainline Protestantism. Viewed from the perspective of the middle of the American Century, mainline Protestantism appears as a former giant whose vitality is spent. Viewed as 13 or even 10 percent of the contemporary American populace, this venerable collection of faith traditions is still a significant group. This book explores in what sense this collection of people and churches is a group with a future and a movement with a voice of public significance. NOTE S 1. The author is grateful to Graham Reside for this telling anecdote and additional demographic contributions for the introduction to the volume. 2. Martin Marty, “Rough Treatment,” Christian Century, July 17, 2013, www .christiancentury.org/blogs/archive/2013-07/rough-treatment; Marty, The New Shape of American Religion (New York: Harper, 1959). 3. Joseph Bottum, “The Death of Protestant America: A Political Theory of the Protestant Mainline,” First Things, August/September 2008, www.firstthings

15 In t rod u c t i on

4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

.com /article /2008/08/001-the -death -of-protestant-america -a -political -theory-of-the-protestant-mainline. The paragraph preceding states, “Somewhere around 1975, the main stream of Protestantism ran dry. In truth, there are still plenty of Methodists around. Baptists and Presbyterians, too—Lutherans, Episcopalians, and all the rest; millions of believing Christians who remain serious and devout. For that matter, you can still find, soldiering on, some of the institutions they established in their mainline glory days: the National Council of Churches, for instance, in its God Box up on New York City’s Riverside Drive, with the cornerstone laid, in a grand ceremony, by President Eisenhower in 1958. But those institutions are corpses, even if they don’t quite realize that they’re dead. The great confluence of Protestantism has dwindled to a trickle over the past thirty years, and the Great Church of America has come to an end.” Diana L. Eck, A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (New York: HarperCollins, 2001). The earliest use of “mainline” as a religious identifier that we have found was from a 1949 article in Mennonite Quarterly Review. The article, written by Don E. Smucker, entitled “Whither Christian Pacifism?” uses the term three times. However, its first use in the popular press seems to be in a 1960 New York Times article by John Wicklein, “Extremists Try to Curb Clergy; Moves to Ban Social Issues Causing Protestant Rift.” We are grateful to Chris Benda of Vanderbilt University Library for tracking down these early scholarly usages. Historian Elesha Coffman is responsible for discovering the New York Times usage. While there may be earlier examples, it is evident that this term, which designates a historically Protestant form of religious identity is, in fact, a relatively recent invention. William Hutchison, Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), vii. William Swatos Jr., “Denomination,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion and Society, ed. William Swatos Jr. (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Alta Mira Press, 1998), http:// hirr.hartsem.edu/ency/denomination.htm. The historian Russell Richey describes the denomination as the quintessential modern form of religious organization, fitted for a democratic society: “The denomination . . . is an ecclesial creature of modernity, a social form emerging with and closely akin to the political party, the free press, and free enterprise. With these other institutions, the denominations and related expressions of voluntary religion produce and sustain the democratic state. Like these other institutions, the individual denomination fits within, contributes to, and borrows from a larger organizational ecology.” Russell Richey, Denominationalism Illustrated and Explained (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2013), 3. Craig Dykstra and James Hudnut-Beumler describe the emergent ecclesial form of organization in the antebellum period as “a weak central church government with a modest set of responsibilities coupled with a wide range of

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10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

loosely related societies for Christian endeavors.” Craig Dykstra and James Hudnut-Beumler, “The National Organizational Structures of Protestant Denominations,” in The Organizational Revolution: Presbyterians and American Denominationalism, ed. Milton J. Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis Weeks (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster / John Knox Press, 1992), 313. Ibid., 316. Ibid., 321. R. Stephen Warner writes, “Amidst the clamor over centralized bureaucracy, mainline Protestant denominational agencies . . . have been cut back, and the denominational structures are internally divided between bureaucrats and judicatories (what sociologists call ‘staff ’ and ‘line’).” R. Stephen Warner, “The Place of the Congregation in the Contemporary American Religious Configuration,” in American Congregations, Volume 2: New Perspectives in the Study of Congregations, ed. James P. Wind and James W. Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 54–99, 74. Ibid., 74. Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 100ff. Indeed, most of the nation’s top universities and colleges, as well as thousands of cultural and social service agencies, have their origins in the efforts of mainline Protestant denominations and leaders, and while this sensibility has certainly be attenuated, it persists. Because of denominations’ declining significance, some observers have rejected them as effective methods for making distinctions within the religious landscape in the United States at all. Wuthnow, Restructuring, 71–99. Roof and McKinney, in their important study of mainline religion, eschewed denominations as categories for mapping the religious landscape. Instead, they recommended the notion of religious “families” of Catholic, Jewish, Liberal Protestant, Moderate Protestant, Conservative Protestant, and Black Protestant as the more salient divides. Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987). Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “Changes in Americans’ Religious Affiliation,” chapter 2 in U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, 2008: Religious Beliefs and Practices (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2008).

1

The State of Contemporary Mainline Protestantism Graham Reside

For the purposes of this chapter, I follow common practice and divide the religious landscape in the United States into four broad categories. Within Protestantism, I distinguish mainline Protestantism from both Evangelicalism and from African American Christianity. I also treat Catholicism as a denomination of Christianity, and thus much of my reporting divides the religious landscape into these four broad categories. Each of these categories represents now-distinct traditions with its particular organizational history as well. T HE STORY OF M AINLINE DECLI NE

Perhaps any account of the state of mainline Protestantism today must take account of its decline over the past generation. The United States has always been exceptional for its high levels of religious participation, and the story of religion in America has been one of almost continuous expansion, with only a few exceptions. The Civil War was accompanied by losses in membership, and the Great Awakenings disrupted the established denominations’ growth rate as they lost market share to the proliferation of new religious groups. However, over the course of U.S. history, growth has been the norm for the majority of religious groups. In their study of U.S. membership patterns, The Churching of America, sociologists Rodney Stark and Roger Finke conclude that the “most striking trend in the history of religion in America is growth.”1 While this growth was partly due to broader population growth, abetted by procreation and immigration, it also was a consequence of increasing levels of participation. If church membership is

18 Th e Sta t e of Con t em p ora r y Ma i n l i ne Pro t e stan t ism

the measure, the United States has become more religious with each generation, until perhaps this one (as I discuss below). The mainline denominations were beneficiaries of the general growth trajectory of religious involvement in the first half of the twentieth century. In the 1940s and 50s, mainline Protestant denominations grew faster than the general population. As returning veterans from the Second World War established families and moved to the suburbs, they showed up at church in ever greater numbers. The year 1946 was the historic high water mark for marriages in the United States, and the baby boom was underway. By 1960, almost 50 percent of all households consisted of families with children under 18. Consequently, as Milton Coulter, John Mulder, and Louis Weeks note, “the expansion of membership . . . in mainstream Protestant denominations during the 1950s is largely the story of parents seeking out religious instruction for their children and church membership for themselves.”2 At the same time, the Cold War had grabbed Americans’ attention, and the impulse to find a common religious stance against “godless communism” no doubt abetted the growth in mainline membership, with its promise of a unified religious culture. In this period, especially, Americans were joiners, seeking to present a unified front against the communist threat. As Sydney Ahlstrom has suggested, at the time, “being a church member and speaking favorably of religion became a means of affirming the ‘American Way of Life.’ ”3 The high point for mainline Protestantism might effectively be identified as October 12th, 1958, when a crowd of 30,000 people gathered at 475 Riverside Drive in New York City to observe President Dwight D. Eisenhower lay the cornerstone of the Interchurch Center, which he described as “the national home of the churches.” In his remarks, Eisenhower noted that the United States was politically free only because it is religiously free, concluding, “without this firm foundation, national morality could not be maintained.” In effect, Eisenhower was christening mainline Protestantism as the religion of the nation. The building at 475 Riverside Drive soon became referred to as the “God Box” and the “Protestant Kremlin.” It was home to the national offices of the mainline denominations as well as the National Council of Churches. 4 Referring to this site as the “national home of the churches” was not a stretch, as over 50 percent of Americans identified as members of mainline denominations at the time. The construction of the “God Box” was

19 The Sta t e of Con t em p ora r y Ma i n l i n e Pro t e stan t ism

symbolic of the growth in church construction that was sweeping the country at the time as well. In response to demand, new church development was booming in the 1950s, with money spent on postwar church construction soaring from $26 million in 1945 to $409 million by 1950. Robert Wuthnow has observed that “the 1950s were the apex of a century and a half of church construction and membership drives.”5 It was a heady time for religion in America, and for the mainline especially . . . and it was all about to change. Within ten years of Eisenhower’s triumphal speech, the mainline denominations were reporting their first declines in membership since the great awakenings of the nineteenth century. The Disciples of Christ first began losing members in 1964. The United Methodist Church (UMC), United Church of Christ (UCC), and Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) all began reporting losses in 1966. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) followed suit in 1967, with the Episcopalians and Reformed Church reporting first-time losses in 1968. By 1970, none of the mainline denominations was reporting growth. And it has been a downward trend ever since. By 1990, the percentage of Americans reporting mainline affiliation had dropped to 18.7 percent of the adult population. By 2001, it was down to 17.2 percent, and in the most recent national polling (2008), it was 12.9 percent. Thus, we see a precipitous decline over four decades in the percentage of Americans who identify with mainline denominations. In that time, the seven major mainline denominations have lost more than 8 million members (table 1.1). By way of illustration, from 1994 to 2004, the PCUSA reported a loss of 336,000 members, or 12 percent. The UCC registered a 15 percent decline in the same period, and the Disciples of Christ a 21 percent loss. By whatever measure, there is broad agreement that the mainline has suffered significant losses, both in terms of membership and in terms of market share. And these declines have come during a time of significant population growth (the U.S. population in 1965 was 194.3 million, in 2013 it was 317 million). Not surprisingly perhaps, there has been much handwringing about this state of affairs, and it has only been encouraged by the apparent growth of Evangelicalism during this same period. Early observers of these phenomena suggested that mainline churches were losing market share because of an inferior product. Mainline theology was too milquetoast, its music too old-fashioned, its assimilation of the culture too complete. This line of

20 Th e Sta t e of Con t em p ora r y Ma i n l i ne Pro t e stan t ism TABL E 1.1 Membership in mainline and evangelical denominations Denomination

1960

1982

1996

2010

Disciples

1,801,821

1,156,458

910,297

691,160

Episcopal

3,269,325

2,794,143

2,536,550

2,057,292

Lutheran (LCA, ELCA)

3,053,243

2,925,655

5,180,910

4,633,887

Presbyterian

4,202,956

3,157,273

3,637,375

2,844,952

2,241,134

1,716,723

1,452,565

1,111,691

10,641,310

9,405,164

8,495,378

7,853,987

Assemblies of God

508,602

1,119,686

2,467,588

2,899,702

Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.)

170,261

463,992

755,230

1,072,169

Southern Baptists

9,731,591

13,991,709

15,691,964

16,228,438

United Church of Christ United Methodist Compared with

Source: From Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches (New York: National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America), ed. B. Landis (1960), C. H. Jacquet (1982), Kenneth B. Bedell (1996), Eileen Lindner (2010), www.cokesbury.com/digitalstore/subscription978687466863 .pdf. Note: The six largest mainline denominations reported losses of 5.6 million members between 1965 and 1990. The Episcopal Church USA led the way, shedding 58% of its membership. PCUSA lost 33% of its membership over same period. The UCC lost 23%, the UMC 20%, the ELCA 8%, and the American Baptist USA declined 2% over this period (Robert Wuthnow, “The Moral Minority: Where Have All the Liberal Protestants Gone?” American Prospect, May 22, 2000, 31).

argument was eloquently introduced by Dean M. Kelley in his 1972 book Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, which implied that the mainline declined because its congregations became weak purveyors of tradition, especially in comparison to resurgent evangelicals. According to Kelley, strong religions offer clear and compelling answers to questions about life’s meaning, they capture their members’ energies for shared purposes, and they demand compliance to a distinctive ethical code, disciplining those members who fail to live up to their standards. Kelley’s essay implied that evangelical congregations did these things while mainline congregations did not. Instead, mainline churches allowed and even encouraged a diversity of theological viewpoints, were reluctant to demand much of their members’ time or effort, and required few if any distinctive rules of con-

21 The Sta t e of Con t em p ora r y Ma i n l i n e Pro t e stan t ism

duct, extending no real costs for failing to live up to them. In short, Kelley argued that strong religious traditions create high levels of commitment, which in turn bind members to one another; conversely, weak religious traditions expect low levels of commitment and find themselves incapable of resisting influences that lower that commitment even further. For Kelley these opposing approaches meant that the relative weakness of mainline Protestantism was leading to a loss of market share to its evangelical competitors for the simple reason that what people really want in their religion is commitment.6 This argument has held considerable power since it was first articulated, and it has elicited a lot of soul searching within the mainline, as people looked to identify where the mainline was exhibiting the signs of weakness. But it is also wrong. More recent and more careful analysis suggests more benign reasons for mainline decline. Most significantly, mainliners have lower birth rates, which means they are not growing through procreation. In the 1950s they benefited from the baby boom. Today, they are suffering a baby shortage. It is one of the costs of upward social mobility, which correlates with later marriage and fewer children. Secondly, immigration is no longer providing any significant supply of members. While immigrants are still majority Christian, they are no longer majority Protestant and even less likely to be mainline. And contra Kelley and others, it is not that people who might have been mainline in the past are flocking to more conservative churches. Rather, the earlier habit of switching from conservative or evangelical affiliation to mainline as part of a person’s upward social mobility is no longer as operative. In other words, it is not that mainline denominations are losing members to evangelical churches, it is that they are not receiving members from evangelical churches in the same numbers as they did in the past. Finally, mainline denominations find themselves in a more crowded religious marketplace, which now includes a growing group of other religious traditions, as well as a rapidly expanding group of Nones—those who do not identify with any religious group. Today, the greater threat is the “no religion” option, not the “strict religion” alternative. Christopher Hitchens and the other new atheists and not Rick Warren may be the greater temptation for would-be mainliners. This evidence provides only cold comfort, of course. If mainline declines are primarily a matter of demographics and birth rates rather than a matter of a “weak product” then while there is less cause for self-flagellation, it is also true that these causes are harder to

22 Th e Sta t e of Con t em p ora r y Ma i n l i n e Pro t e stan t ism

overcome. Adding PowerPoint, an electric guitar, and discipleship classes will not address the underlying issues of low birth rates, changing immigration patterns, and a more crowded religious marketplace. THE BROADE R C ONT EX T: C H A NG E S I N A M E R IC A N S O C I E T Y

The religious landscape in the United States has always been a lively one, characterized by continuous change, conflict, and contestation. However, the past generation has witnessed some particularly noticeable shifts and developments that call for attention. Social changes since the 1990s especially promise to have far-reaching consequences for how we think about religion in America and the role of the mainline within it. In this section, I briefly identify some of the most salient developments that bear particularly on the place, function, and meaning of the mainline within the broader landscape of American religion. Immigration and Its Implications for Religion in the United States Perhaps the most important dynamic redrawing of the contours of religion in America has been the changes in patterns of immigration that have occurred over the past generation. If America is a country of immigrants, then attention to immigration patterns should tell us something important about America’s religious life. It does. Since the 1965 Immigration Reform Act, which opened the doors to a more global immigrant pool, the United States has become both more ethnically and religiously diverse, as the size of the minority population has grown significantly. Of course, the United States has always been ethnically and racially diverse, and immigration has been a major source of population growth and religious change throughout our history. However, in the last few decades, both the patterns and pace of immigration have shifted. The years 1991–2000 represented the greatest single decade of immigration, with 10–11 million people immigrating legally to the USA (the highest decade previously was 1900–1910, when 8.8 million people immigrated).7 And since 2000, the immigration rate has been about 1 million per year. Thus, since 1990, immigration accounts for about one-third

23 The Sta t e of Con t em p ora r y Ma i n l i n e Pro t e stan t ism

of the overall population growth (the adult population grew 53 million over this period). 8 As a consequence of this increase there are (as of 2014) roughly 41 million foreign-born adults in the country (this figure includes nearly 12 million unauthorized residents). And while the majority of immigrants still identify as Christian, the internal makeup of this group is distinctive and has changed over time. The single most noteworthy feature of immigration is that 53 percent of the nation’s foreign born are now from Latin America and the Caribbean (this does not include undocumented immigrants). In 2010 there were 21.2 million people from Latin America and the Caribbean out of a total of 40 million foreign-born individuals.9 As a consequence, nearly half of all immigrants are Catholics (48 percent), outnumbering Protestant immigrants two to one.10 This steady immigration of Hispanics represents a major shift in the overall ethnic makeup of the nation, with Hispanics recently supplanting African Americans as the nation’s largest ethnic minority group (15 percent versus 14 percent), and it has contributed to the “de-whiting” of America. For example, in 1960, non-Hispanic whites made up 85 percent of the U.S. population. By 2005, whites represented 67 percent of the population, and a U.S. Census Bureau study projects that by 2043, non-Hispanic whites will be under 50 percent.11 Given the mainline’s historic racial makeup—it is over 90 percent white—this dynamic is bound to have a decentering effect on mainline denominations. In terms of religious identification, this immigration trend means that Latinos now account for one-third of all adult Catholics in the United States. Fully a quarter of all Catholics today were born outside the United States, and 82 percent of those foreign-born Catholics are from Latin America. It is this influx of immigrants Catholics that has allowed Catholics to maintain their share (roughly 25 percent) of the religious market. Indeed, absent these immigrants, Catholics would be experiencing a story of decline similar to that of mainline Protestants, who have not benefited from immigration in anywhere near the same degree. Indeed, while one-fifth of immigrants who arrived before 1960 identify as mainline Protestants, among those who arrived after 1999, only 5 percent report mainline affiliation. In other words, immigration is not a significant source of supply for mainline Protestants. It is for Catholics and, to a much smaller degree, for evangelicals.12

24 Th e Sta t e of Con t em p ora r y Ma i n l i n e Pro t e stan t ism

Of course, immigration since 1965 has brought more people from nonChristian religious traditions to America’s shores as well. Thus, there has also been a significant growth since 1965 in the number of Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and other smaller religious groups in America. For example, the Muslim population grew from 527,000 to 1.35 million between 1990 and 2008.13 However, while these growth rates are robust, in the overall religious economy, non-Christian traditions still represent a very small piece of the pie. And, as Stephen Warner has noted, even immigrants coming from non-Christian countries are still disproportionately Christian. The more important consequence of immigration has been what he calls the “de-Europeanization of Christianity” rather than the pluralization of American religion.14 Shifts within American Christianity While the United States is still a predominantly Christian nation, this fact can obscure important changes, such as the growth of Catholicism and the de-Europeanization of Christianity, mentioned above. Another important recent trend has been the rise of generic evangelical sensibility among Christians. This trend is coupled with a decline in the use of the term “Protestant.” The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) indicates that the use of the generic “Christian” and “non-denominational Christian” grew from 8.2 million (or 4.7 percent) in 1990 to almost 25 million (10.9 percent) in 2008. Over the same period, the use of the term “Protestant” declined from 17.2 million (9.8 percent) to 5.2 million (2.3 percent). And mainline denominational affiliation also declined, from 18.7 percent to 12.9 percent over this 18-year period. Moreover, 34 percent of respondents described themselves as “born-again” or “evangelical.” What may be more surprising than this figure is the fact that fully 38.6 percent of mainline Protestants and 18 percent of Catholics identified as evangelical or born-again. Taken together, the decline in the use of Protestant or one of the mainline tags in self-identification and the increase in “non-denominational,” “Christian,” and “evangelical” or “born-again” suggests the generalization of a generic Evangelicalism as the operative religious vocabulary of America. Mark Silk has posited that these data indicate that “there is now this shift in the non-Catholic population—and maybe among American Christians in general—into a sort of generic, soft evangelicalism.” And the

25 The Sta t e of Con t em p ora r y Ma i n l i n e Pro t e stan t ism

authors of the ARIS report conclude that these trends indicate “a movement towards more conservative beliefs and particularly to a more ‘evangelical’ outlook among Christians.”15 It is possible that people are responding in these terms because this kind of religious discourse has emerged as normative for more people, and terms like “Protestant” are losing their resonance. In other words, generic Evangelicalism has emerged as the vocabulary of American Christians, abetted in part by the media presence of evangelicals but also by the failure of other communities of faith to provide a meaningful alternative. If this is right, then generic evangelical responses may indicate a default answer to pollsters rather than a signal of the true location of religious commitment. (This seems a better account for the surprising fact that over 18 percent of Catholics agreed that they were “evangelical or born-again.”)16 The Rise of the Nones A third feature of note is the rise of the religiously unaffiliated (those whom the pollsters call the Nones). It has become a truism in the study of American religion that Americans are exceptional in their religiosity. Observers from Tocqueville on have found American rates of religious participation remarkable. And as noted above, the story of religion in America has been one of increasing religiosity, a story of the increasing “churching” of America over time. Thus, one of the more surprising findings of recent surveys has been the rapid growth of respondents who answer “none” or “no religion” when queried about their affiliation. This group increased from 8.1 percent in 1990 to 14.1 percent in 2000 to 15 percent in 2008. While this category includes some anti-church theists, it also includes non-theists and the avowedly atheistic or non-religious. Indeed, the number of people willing to describe themselves as atheist or agnostic grew almost fourfold from 1990 to 2009, from 1 million to about 3.6 million. (That is about double the number of Episcopalians in the United States.) As a group, the unaffiliated represent 34.2 million Americans; if it were a denomination, it would be the third largest in the country, behind only Catholics and Baptists. The Nones are overrepresented in the West, where they make up one-fifth of the population. (The ARIS survey uses the same regions as the U.S. Census, so Texas is in the South, not the West.) But the Nones are also strong in the Northeast, once the stronghold of the mainline denominations.

26 Th e Sta t e of Con t em p ora r y Ma i n l i n e Pro t e stan t ism

The growth of this segment leads the ARIS authors to conclude that “the challenge to Christianity . . . does not come from other religions but from a rejection of all forms of organized religion.”17 And in fact, the number of Americans who identify themselves as Christian declined from 86 percent in 1990 to 76 percent in 2008, which is almost fully accounted for by the expansion in the ranks of the unaffiliated. Other data points from the None category bear on the status of the mainline in America. The data on young Americans are especially chastening. ARIS reports that young Americans are much more likely than older Americans to identify as Nones (25 percent of those aged 18–29 identify as Nones). This seems especially relevant to the mainline, which not only has low birth rates but also a weak record (compared to other religious groups) in retaining the youth they do have. By detailing the age distribution of different religious groups, for instance, Pew survey findings show that while more than six in ten Americans age 70 and older (62 percent) are Protestant, this number is only about four in ten (43 percent) among Americans ages 18–29. Conversely, young adults ages 18–29 are much more likely than those aged 70 and older to say that they are not affiliated with any particular religion (25 percent versus 8 percent).18 If these generational patterns persist, recent declines in the number of mainline Protestants and growth in the size of the unaffiliated population will only become more dramatic. The Mega-church Phenomenon One of the remarkable features of the contemporary organization of religious life in the United States has been the rise of the mega-church. There have always been large congregations in America, but this sector has grown dramatically and signals a more fundamental trend. American churchgoers are consolidating, with more and more attendees going to fewer and fewer churches. This has created a divide in the religious marketplace between successful and growing large and mega-churches and small and dwindling local congregations. One does not have to agree with Peter Drucker, who observed that mega-churches are the most important social phenomenon in American society over the past 30 years, to recognize that mega-churches are inexorably altering the landscape of American religion and changing the place of the mainline.

27 The Sta t e of Con t em p ora r y Ma i n l i n e Pro t e stan t ism

The contemporary mega-church has its organizational and theological roots in the revivalist movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. However, the real growth in the mega-church sector began in the 1970s, when the number of congregations whose membership exceeded 2,000 (the threshold for defining a church as a “mega-church”) grew from 50 in 1970 to 150 in 1980. By 2000, the number was 600; by 2007, it was over 1,300. Scott Thumma and Dave Travis note that 44 percent of megachurches have been founded since 1975, and nearly 75 percent have experienced a 20 percent growth rate since 2000.19 Even more notable, the average growth rate in this sector between 2000 and 2005 was 57 percent. In the context of declining religious participation, the mega-church represents a dramatic break. The demographics and geography of the mega-church phenomenon are telling. In their 2007 mega-church study, Kimberly Karnes et al. discovered that while scattered across the country, mega-churches are especially concentrated in the suburbs and exurbs of the Sunbelt states. Sixty percent of all mega-churches are in the West or the South, with most located in just three states, California, Texas, and Florida. Further, these churches tend to draw from a highly educated, relatively wealthy, young and professional constituency. They tend to be affiliated with evangelical, charismatic, or conservative denominations, and they are often part of the non-denominational movement.20 Only 11 percent of mega-churches are affiliated with mainline denominations, though this still represents about 140 congregations with more than 2,000 members. Eighty percent of mega-churches are majority white, but around 10 percent are predominantly African American and another 2 percent are majority Hispanic and 2 percent Asian.21 Several explanations have been proffered for the rise of the mega-church. Mark Chaves points to economic realities as their impetus. Within American Christianity congregational giving since 1970 has fallen behind the rising costs of operations. As a result, smaller churches find themselves with fewer members and less money; as a result they have been forced to cut back on the extent and quality of their programming. While this might work as a strategy in some environments, it fails in the context of church. A lean church is not a successful church, so these programmatic cutbacks have made these congregations less appealing sites for religious participation. Meanwhile, the mega-church can offer more bang for the buck: better

28 Th e Sta t e of Con t em p ora r y Ma i n l i ne Pro t e stan t ism

music, more programs, greater opportunities for social outreach and mission. As a simple matter of economies of scale, mega-churches can offer more programming per dollar than their smaller neighbors can. So while the small church declines in programming, mega-churches step in with their sophisticated presentations and professionalized music. Mark Chaves suggests that in matters of programming, smaller churches simply cannot compete. To buttress this account, Chaves shows a growing divide between large and small congregations, with more and more of Americans congregating in fewer and fewer churches. In other words, while the majority of congregations have fewer than 100 members, the vast majority of Americans attend large churches. In fact, the largest 10 percent of congregations account for roughly half of all churchgoers, leading Chaves to conclude that while most congregations are small, most people are associated with large congregations.22 Others have suggested that mega-churches are attractive because they fit more closely the lived experience of their members. For an increasing portion of the population, they are familiar spaces, designed on the model of the commercial complexes or corporate headquarters in which many of us work.23 The music more closely resembles the music members listen to on the radio than to the classic hymns of more traditional congregations, and the form of presentation, replete with PowerPoint projection and dramatic plays and concerts, is more consonant with the lived experience of congregants. Their ministers “dress down,” often in business casual, and invite members to do the same. Thumma and Travis suggest mega-churches draw because “there is considerable resonance between what ordinary people in society value and what the megachurches have to offer.”24 Mega-churches are not strange spaces, but familiar ones, sometimes replete with coffee shops and bookstores. Theology matters, too. While there is diversity in theological orientations, it is also true that many mega-churches tend to emphasize a highly personalistic and therapeutic approach to religious life, one especially attractive to their predominantly family-oriented baby boomer constituencies. These are seeker-friendly churches, for the most part, and the messages are directed toward a useable personal piety. Stephen Ellingson suggests that a comfortable familiarity and a practical theology make mega-churches the destination of more and more Americans each year, concluding that people flock to these spaces because “megachurches offer people access to the

29 The Sta t e of Con t em p ora r y Ma i n l i n e Pro t e stan t ism

sacred in ways that conform to their artistic, cultural, and religious tastes and provide better answers to their audiences pressing existential questions about the self, morality, family, and/or work.”25 Whatever the reasons for their proliferation—and I suggest the reasons are many and complex—it is a fact of religious life in America: the megachurch has reshaped both how American Christians congregate and how they think about and experience religious life. THE M EG A- C HURC H AND TH E MAI NLI NE

The consequences of the rise of the mega-church have taken a particular shape for mainliners, effectively attenuating denominational distinctiveness and moving them in a more evangelical direction. In Megachurch and the Mainline, Ellingson suggests that a generic evangelical style and theology is part of the DNA of mega-churches. Consequently, the growth of mega-churches within the mainline has contributed to the evangelical colonization of the mainline through the unintended consequences of content following form. The largest mainline congregations are where growth and vitality are happening. But Ellingson’s study suggests that the tendency is for these large churches to act more like their evangelical sister congregations and less like their denominational siblings. In other words, the gravitational pull within even mainline mega-churches is toward a non-denominational, generic “Christian” sensibility. There are several reasons for this development. First, there is the simple dynamic of imitation. Willow Creek, Saddleback, the Crystal Cathedral, Lakewood, and others are the models for mega-church success. They are, by dint of historical precedent, the exemplars. Furthermore, these and other non-denominational suppliers provide the resources and educational opportunities utilized by many large mainline congregations. The largest mainline congregations are thus more likely to use the evangelical mega-church playbook, drawing on Rick Warren’s 40 Days of Purpose Sunday school curriculum or Willow Creek’s resources for their small groups, than they are to seek denominationally produced materials.26 Within the mega-church sector, the largest and most successful are their own brands, and those that have a denominational affiliation seek to minimize it. For many, it is a marketing strategy. The presumption is that denominational identification is more limiting than inviting. Likewise, in the

30 Th e Sta t e of Con t em p ora r y Ma i n l i ne Pro t e stan t ism

mainline denominations, the largest congregations are often the most resistant to, and even resentful of, denominational expectations; they have a more attenuated sense of denominational identity and are likely to downplay their affiliations. The result is that denominational distinctiveness tends to be swept away as congregational leaders seek to adapt to a broader market to widen their appeal. As a result, large congregations lose their identity as denominational communities of memory and become instead what Ellingson calls communities of interest.27 In this telling, the traditional mainline congregation offers its members participation in a community of memory insofar as it not only strives to maintain its particular congregational story but also understands itself as part of a larger moral and theological tradition extending back through time. Mega-churches appeal on a different basis, presenting themselves as communities of interest, or lifestyle enclaves, which tend to “form around limited interests, often self-interests.” And it is true, the important “signature narratives” in the mega-church setting is not the story of the tradition but of the mega-church itself, or of its often charismatic leader. The rise of the mega-church has thus transformed Christianity in America in a variety of ways. Mega-churches have emerged as quasi-denominations, as they have come to assume functions that once were part of the denominational portfolio: they are engaged in publishing, church planting, conference and workshop organizing, curriculum production, even clergy training. Today, these functions are being offered through mega-churches at the same time that mainline denominational programmatic offerings are in steep decline. Both supply and demand are at work in this shift. In fact, the megachurches are responding, at least in part, to the demands of their would-be members, shaping their medium and their message to meet the desires of their constituents. The more highly educated, and more mobile, people who make up the majority of mega-church membership understand themselves as religious consumers and not primarily as committed denominational members. The ascendancy of a consumerist orientation toward religion, at least among a growing segment of the population, has both facilitated the growth of the mega-church and the weakening of denominational commitment, but it is not the child of either. The rise of the consumerist approach to religion is fed by a variety of cultural streams and social realities. And as a consequence, mainline Protestantism finds itself struggling to

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understand and express itself in a very different social context than it did even 30 years ago.

W HO ARE M AINLINE PROTE STANT S TODAY?

Mainline Protestantism occupies a distinct place in the religious landscape in the United States. And while the place of the mainline has undergone significant shifts over the past two generations, it still represents an important religious location and identity. According to the 2008 ARIS survey, approximately 21 million American adults identify as mainline Protestants. This figure represents roughly 13 percent of the adult population. Of course, the category “mainline Protestantism” represents a big tent and contains a great deal of internal diversity and difference along a broad range of social and cultural markers. The mainline is spread across geographic, cultural, theological, and social space. It includes young and old, Democrats, Republicans, and independents. Its affiliates are found in every state of the Union, and its churches are marked by broad diversity of belief and practice. However, it is also true that in the aggregate, mainline Protestants have a particular social profile and characteristic patterns of culture, belief, and practice. In this section, I review the distinguishing features of contemporary mainline Protestants, first in terms of their demographics and then in terms of their beliefs and practices, in order to provide a more nuanced profile of this still important segment of contemporary American religion.

M A I N L I N E S O C I A L P R OF I L E

Education While surveys demonstrate a broad range of educational attainment among mainline Protestants, as a group they are remarkable for their relatively high levels of academic attainment (table 1.2). Thirty-four percent of mainliners have a college degree of higher (12 percent have graduate education), compared to 27 percent of the general population. Put another way, while mainliners represent only 13 percent of the population, nearly a quarter of Americans with graduate education are members of the mainline. Conversely, only 11 percent of those with less than a high school education

32 Th e Sta t e of Con t em p ora r y Ma i n l i ne Pro t e stan t ism TABL E 1.2 Education level, income level, and age distribution (%) among mainline denominations High levels of education (college or postgraduate)

Income above $75,000

Income below $30,000

Age 18–29

Age 65+

Total population

27

33

31

20

16

ECUSA

57

53

24

11

25

UCC

42

32

27

11

28

PCUSA

47

46

16

8

32

Disciples of Christ

35

34

31

10

35

ELCA

30

32

24

8

27

American Baptist

14

17

46

18

23

UMC

35

38

23

11

26

Denomination

Source: Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, 2008: Religious Beliefs and Practices (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2008), 80.

belong to the mainline. Given the correlation of education and occupational status, it is not surprising that mainliners are also overrepresented in the higher sectors of the labor force, with 49 percent reporting as professionals, managers, or business owners (compared to 26 percent of the general population).28 As table 1.3 demonstrates, mainliners continue to enjoy higher educational achievement than most other religious groups in the United States, with members of Catholic, evangelical, and historically black churches reporting significantly lower levels of education. For instance, over half of evangelical (52.5 percent) and historically black Protestants (54.5 percent) have only a high school education or less, compared with 34.3 percent among mainliners. As a consequence, nearly one in three (31 percent) American adults with less than a high school education identify as evangelical Protestants, while almost one in ten (9 percent) describe themselves as members of historically black Protestant churches. Conversely, among people with a college degree, fewer than one in four (22 percent) belong to the

33 The Sta t e of Con t em p ora r y Ma i n l i n e Pro t e stan t ism TABL E 1.3 Level of education among religious groups (%) Religious group General population

Less than High school Some College Grad school Technical high school graduate college graduate or more school/other 14.0

36.0

23.0

16.0

11.0

N/A

8.2

26.1

28.2

21.8

11.9

3.1

20.4

32.1

25.3

13.6

5.0

2.6

Catholic

15.8

28.5

25.4

15.4

7.6

2.8

African American

22.3

32.1

25.7

12.2

5.1

2.1

Mainline Evangelical

Source: ARIS 2008.

evangelical tradition, and only 5 percent belong to historically black churches. Among those who have obtained post-graduate education, the comparable figures are 16 percent and 3 percent, respectively. This pattern is reversed among members of mainline Protestant churches. Nearly one in four U.S. adults (23 percent) with a post-graduate education are members of mainline churches, and 34 percent of mainliners report having a college degree.29 Income Since education and income correlate closely, it is not surprising that mainline Protestants tend to share in more of the income distribution relative to other religious groups. Among mainliners, 29.2 percent report household income above $75,000, and only 21.7 percent report income less than $30,000. These are the highest and lowest percentages of the major Christian groups, representing over a 9 percentage point edge above evangelicals on the upper end of the income scale ($75,000 or more) and 7 points less on the low end ($30,000 or less). Compared to African American Protestants, mainliners are 14 points more on the upper end (29.2 percent compared to 14.9 percent with household income of $75,000 or more) and 21 points less on the lower end of the income scale (21.7 percent compared to 42.7 percent with household income less than $30,000).

34 Th e Sta t e of Con t em p ora r y Ma i n l i n e Pro t e stan t ism Table 1.4 Income distribution by religious affiliation (%) Religious group

Less than $20,000

$20–30,000

$30–50,000

$50–75,000

More than $75,000

Mainline

12.5

9.2

16.6

14.7

29.2

Evangelical

18.3

10.7

17.0

14.4

20.1

Catholic

17.0

10.1

13.4

11.8

25.6

African American

30.1

12.6

15.9

10.2

14.9

Source: ARIS 2008. Note: These entries do not add up to 100%. There is a high percentage of “refuse to answer” and “don’t know” responses when questions of income arise. Also, all of these figures are self-reports and unlikely to be completely accurate. However, since the margins of error are consistent across the groups surveyed, these figures at least give us a sense of income distribution by religious group.

Table 1.4 demonstrates the continued social advantages associated with mainline identity. Mainliners have more household income than the other major religious groups, and they are least likely to find themselves living below the poverty line. Higher levels of both academic and economic attainment remind us, too, that mainliners are more likely to occupy positions of social power and influence.30 Despite the diminution of mainline status, mainline Protestants remain above the national average in terms of the standard measures of social success—education and income. Racial and Ethnic Makeup While mainline Protestants have long articulated a strong commitment to diversity, compared to the nation as a whole the mainline is disproportionately white, at 92 percent. African Americans represent only 3.8 percent of the mainline population, and Hispanics and Asians make up less than 1 percent each. From one perspective, these findings do not represent anything new; this racial and ethnic makeup has remained fairly constant over the past 40 years. However, this racial constancy becomes more remarkable when we recall that the general population has been growing increasingly diverse over that same period. In 1960—the high water mark of mainline religious identification—nearly nine out of ten Americans were white

35 The Sta t e of Con t em p ora r y Ma i n l i n e Pro t e stan t ism TABL E 1 .5 Racial makeup of the United States (%) Year

White

African American

Hispanic

Asian

1960

88.5

10.0

N/A

0.2

1990

75.6

11.7

9.0

2.8

2008

66.0

14.0

15.0

5.0

Note: Compiled from U.S. Census Data, 1960–2008. Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, “Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, for the United States, Regions, Divisions, and States,” Working Paper Series no. 56 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, September 2002).

(88 percent). So the fact that nine of ten mainline Protestants were also white merely reflected the nation as a whole. As a result, mainline Protestant congregations’ racial composition more directly reflected the makeup of the nation. But the racial makeup of the nation has undergone a significant shift. By 1990 the census was describing a much more racially diverse nation (75.6 percent white, 9 percent Hispanic, 11.7 percent African American, and 2.8 percent Asian). And by 2008, the general population was 66 percent white, 15 percent Hispanic, 14 percent African American, and 5 percent Asian. Current projections indicate that by 2043, the United States will no longer be a majority white nation. So while mainline Protestant racial composition has not changed over the past 50 years, the rest of the nation has. Table 1.5 demonstrates the shifts in racial makeup of the United States since 1960. As the nation becomes less white, it is also becoming less Christian. And in fact, evangelicals and mainline are both out of step with the racial makeup of the wider population. However, even given the reality of the deEuropeanization and browning of the nation, and the persistence of racial homogeneity within Christian groups more generally, it is also true that mainline Protestants remain the whitest of the major Christian groups. Table 1.6 captures the current racial and ethnic makeup of the major Christian groups in the United States. (Since the African American Protestant category is by definition racially homogenous, it is not included.) It demonstrates both that Christianity in the United States no longer represents the racial makeup of the nation as a whole and that the

36 Th e Sta t e of Con t em p ora r y Ma i n l i n e Pro t e stan t ism TABL E 1.6 Racial/ethnic makeup of Christian America (%), 2008 Religious group

White

Hispanic

African American

Asian

General population

66.0

15.0

14.0

5.0

Mainline

92.0