‘Mainline’ Church Strength Shrinks : If Trend Continues, Protestants’ Liberal Groups Will Be in Minority

If long-term trends continue, the once-dominant liberal and moderate denominations will soon become a minority in American Protestantism.

Presbyterian, Episcopal, Methodist and like congregations came to be called “mainline churches” this century because they not only attracted educated, middle-class people but also represented the great majority of U.S. Protestants.

In 1920, mainline bodies constituted 76% of America’s Protestant population, but by last year that figure had fallen to 53%. The figures were compiled by Harvard University’s William Hutchison for a recent small conference with a pointed theme, “Does Liberal Protestantism Have an American Future?”

The conference’s two dozen sociologists, historians and church leaders, meeting last month on the University of California at Santa Barbara campus, found no consensus on what might reverse the mainline church slide.

Aging Membership

They did agree that the churches are suffering from aging membership, relatively few young adults (compared to the evangelical, charismatic and fundamentalist churches) and lack of a stirring message.

On the latter point, one scholar reflected the views of many of his colleagues by observing, “Liberal Protestantism seems to have run out of ideas”--a refrain similar to the current lament of political liberals in the Democratic Party.

But survey material shows precisely where the mainline churches are failing:

- They are disproportionately made up of people over the age of 50 compared to the conservative churches as well as to the population at large.

- The parents are more liberal than their children. “It is now firmly established that the prime source of membership losses sustained by the liberal denominations is the failure of the offspring of their members to affiliate with a liberal religious body,” said Benton Johnson of the University of Oregon.

- Recent research by two sociologists shows that “church switching,” once a major source of new members for mainline churches, is drying up. Mainline churches, never known for aggressive evangelism, received many new members from conservative, often morally strict churches with a lower social-economic membership. As conservative churchgoers became better educated and improved their economic status, many of them joined mainline congregations, which were less at odds with secular society, reflected broader cultural tolerance and respected educated views of life.

Social, Moral Issues

Now, conservative Protestant churches have been relating more to social and moral political issues, have built more large and attractive churches, and have begun to attract a broader middle-class constituency. The 1976 election of Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter as President illustrated the arrival of “born-again” Christians to the mainstream.

“We have a decreasing socioeconomic difference between liberal and evangelical churches,” said William McKinney, a United Church of Christ researcher.

McKinney’s study, with sociologist Wade Clark Roof of the University of Massachusetts, found that among Americans below age 45, the conservative churches lose only 5.6% of their members to “secular society” while liberal denominations lose between 9% and 12% to the unaffiliated ranks.

“Growing numbers of Americans are being born and raised outside the influence of traditional religion,” Roof said. People without religious affiliation--those called the “nones” by pollsters--accounted for only 3% among those born at the turn of the century whereas they amount to 13% in a recent “baby-boom” generation, Roof said.

Obviously, the mainline churches--which also include three Lutheran bodies, the United Church of Christ and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)--are not homogeneous. They include conservative clergy and congregations. To the extent that these churches enlist new members, especially among young families, the nature of the “liberal” denominations could change and, some say, could survive in a Protestant realignment.

No Longer Threat

The diminishing strength of mainline churches has also been demonstrated by the way conservative preachers have changed their objects of wrath. Conservative churches of 15 to 20 years ago railed against beliefs taught in liberal churches, but for the last half-dozen years the primary opponent has been “secular humanists,” accused of keeping prayer out of public schools and polluting the nation’s morals in universities and in the entertainment media.

Hutchison suggested to colleagues at the UC Santa Barbara conference that minority status is not a devastating blow for the liberal-to-moderate churches. He cited the relatively strong peace witness made by a tiny group, the Quakers.

However, if people pay less attention to liberal Protestants, a longstanding bridge and buffer between religious and non-religious America will have been removed.

In other words, the gap between believers and non-believers was softened because the mainliners talked in less dogmatic and less supernatural terms to a society accustomed to thinking in scientific and ordinary terms. If to some critics the mainline churches became “a left-leaning marshmallow,” the liberals at least bridged the intellectual and cultural gap. It is uncertain whether the U.S. Roman Catholic Church, which includes more than 50 million Americans, will fill that role.

New Realignment

Roof has predicted that a new religious realignment between conservative Protestants and traditionalist Catholics “will inevitably influence public discourse about religion (resulting in) greater separation of religious and secular cultures.”

This gap will be “a source of bitter confrontation and moral crusading,” Roof said.

In analyzing what went wrong for the mainline churches, scholars sometimes start from an interlude in the mainline church decline in the 1950s. Churchgoing became fashionable and public piety was popular then. Liberal and moderate denominations amounted to 61% of the Protestant population in 1950 and rose to 62% in 1960.

Liberal church efforts in the mid- and late 1960s to help civil rights causes did not cut into their membership as much as once thought, sociologists say, but something else related to that apparently did, according to Dean Joseph Hough of the School of Theology at Claremont.

Liberal Protestants, though chastened by World War I and the Great Depression of the 1930s, presented an optimistic faith that people can change things for the better. “The profound liberal Christian optimism coincided with an optimistic American political faith,” Hough said.

Spirit of Optimism

Martin Luther King Jr. rekindled the spirit of optimism for black and white Protestants during most of his life by raising hopes about social integration and racial equality, Hough said .

What has happened in intervening years, Hough suggested, is that liberal activists and church leaders became pessimistic about American domestic and foreign policies while the fundamentalists, who emphasize patriotism and what they see as America’s virtues, appear to be preaching a hopeful faith.

“The conservatives have seized the energy of democratic faith,” Hough said.

Leonard I. Sweet, president of Methodist-related United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, has a litany of faults he sees in his denomination. He cited a frequent sense of tiredness and lack of mystery--”liberals have not known what to do with (faith) healing, for instance.” Sweet also felt that social action is not a rallying point (“nobody is against it”) and that it is hard to get excited about “pluralism.”

Conservative Protestant churches conduct popular Bible studies that claim to offer practical answers to everyday problems and “explain” current events in apocalyptic terms.

Mainline churches presumably could offer alternate, critically informed studies of the Bible--as is available in many of their seminaries. That is usually not done for a variety of reasons, partly because many conservative parishioners would be shocked at many interpretations. In addition, seemingly increasing numbers of mainline pastors are becoming more conservative. Thus, they believe the Bible is historically reliable and harmonious in its entirety or simply find that critical biblical analysis does more harm than good in pastoring.

Complex Theologies

By the same token, some church leaders doubt whether the average churchgoer (or minister) is interested in subtle and complex theologies, which could potentially bring new excitement into “progressive” churches. One often cited is “process theology,” a 20th-Century movement that says God is not as powerful as traditionally claimed but feels the joys, sufferings and achievements of humans and attempts to lure them toward creative advances and beauty. Even the generally upbeat process theologians are not fully confident about the future of humanity, however.

Claremont’s Hough indicated that mainline Protestant leaders would be troubled by any “romantic optimism” that would ignore inequities in distribution of wealth and unfairness in foreign policies.

While academic analysts tend to be pessimistic about liberal churches recouping losses, the denominations themselves are renewing the effort to replenish their pews. To a great extent, they are trying to restate their mission and perhaps to embrace those who want beliefs stated in more traditional terms.

The 3.1-million-member Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) last fall announced a five-year “New Age Dawning Effort” program aimed at training 75% of its clergy and at least 200,000 lay people in hopes af achieving a 5% membership growth.

A survey of Presbyterian congregational leaders released last February showed that nearly equal numbers picked three items as top priorities for the denomination: enriching family life and marriages, evangelism efforts, and “promoting peacemaking.” A proposed statement of purpose going before the Presbyterians’ next General Assembly praises diversity, the biblical model of the “suffering servant” and the ideals of both evangelism and justice-seeking.

Risk Taking

The Presbyterian statement also gently chides church members for being cautious about risk-taking, “often preferring to avoid confrontation and suffering in order to preserve institutional harmony.”

And yet controversies can appear to inhibit church growth. Stephen W. Smith, stated clerk of the Presbyterians’ Los Angeles-based synod, said when church members are forced to take sides on issues involving the denomination fewer people are invited to church and members are uneasy about their denominational identification.

Presbyterians can accept more diversity in their ranks, Smith suggested, as long as the issues have not become items of public dispute.

In that same vein, the director of the Southern Baptists’ church-starting department has warned that the hard-fought, public struggle for leadership in this denomination, the nation’s largest Protestant body, could undermine its continued growth.

“These diversions could become extremely significant and detrimental if they begin to center around racial issues, ordination of women or a common system of biblical interpretation,” said Nelson Tilton of Nashville in a speech last month.

Baptist Editorial

The California Southern Baptist newspaper echoed such concerns in an editorial last week. “Baptisms and church growth seem to be slowing and certainly our energies are being dissipated,” the editorial said.

The evangelistically oriented Southern Baptists have always set high goals for growth. But considerable skepticism greeted the decision last year of the United Methodist Church’s General Conference to more than double its size in eight years.

(The Methodists’ declining U.S. membership is now about 9.3 million compared to the climbing 14.3 million total in Southern Baptist churches. The Southern Baptists took over the No. 1 spot as the largest Protestant denomination by the start of the 1970s.)

Such a dramatic reversal “seems wildly unrealistic,” according to one appraisal, but if the best long-term strategy for liberal to moderate Protestants is to advance women and racial minorities at leadership levels and take pride in that pluralism, then the United Methodist Church should be in the forefront.

What effect the increasing numbers of women clergy will have, if any, on church affiliation is yet to be seen. Women’s ordination is one major difference between mainline and conservative Protestantism.

Conservative and mainline denominations both have started or embraced growing numbers of Latino, Korean, Chinese and other ethnic congregations.

But the Rev. William Boggs, pastor of Wilshire United Methodist Church, whose Easter morning service will be telecast live Sunday on NBC, says the mainline churches, especially the Methodist, tend to promote outstanding women and minority ministers--even as high as bishops--whereas conservative denominations remain largely led by white males.

Ethnic Mix

Boggs, a Yale-educated minister formerly with the Church of the Nazarene, said his Los Angeles congregation has both a good ethnic mix and a conservative theology. Boggs indicated the future of Methodism was bright if it combined conservative beliefs with a liberal social conscience.

The evangelical “Good News” movement in the United Methodist Church and its equivalents in other mainline denominations continue to remind church leaders of a membership that has remained basically conservative on religious questions.

One hallmark of mainline churches has been the challenges their leaders have made to eliminate social prejudices, examine new moral issues and extend the lines of ecumenical contact.

Since many evangelical Protestant churches now do that, some analysts foresee only distinctions in Protestantism in the future only between evangelicals and fundamentalists--with the evangelicals composed of neo-conservative mainliners and old-line evangelical churches concerned with social justice. Meanwhile, a trend noted by sociologists Roof and McKinney may continue to grow, that of young liberals leaving religion altogether.