Thinking about Mainline Religion

A Trip in my Time Machine

In his SubStack this week, Ryan Burge shared what he saw as the four most dramatic shifts in American Religion since the middle of the 20th century. They were 1) the Evangelical Surge from the mid-80s through the end of the century, 2) Religious Disaffiliation among youth in the 1990s, 3) the Rise of the Nones in the 90s and 2000s, and 4) the Collapse of the Mainline from the mid-70s through the 80s.

Today I want to reflect on that last one.

From Ryan Burge, used with permission

I engaged a little bit on Twitter¹ suggesting the role that the age of congregants played coming out of the peak Mainline years of the 1950s. Bob Smietana pointed out in response that lower birth rates played a role as well.

Other factors come quickly to mind. Suburbanization is one — some of the shift to evangelicalism was because that’s where the new thriving churches were while many mainline congregations were still maintaining older downtown facilities². The surge of bells and whistles youth group programming³ also played a role that pulled religious youth out of their more staid congregations.

The more I thought about Mainline decline, the more I was drawn to some books by sociologists who were trying to understand those dynamics in the moment. As it happens, a couple of those books are still in my personal library having made the various moves with me across various parts of the US.

One of these is titled “Understanding Church Growth and Decline: 1950-1978” edited by Dean Hoge and David Roozen written in 1979. Their data shows that the various Mainline denominations peaked in the mid-60s in total membership and started declining in the early 70s.⁴ They organize the various essays in their book according to four broad classifications: National contextual factors (changing expectations of religious behavior), national institutional factors (e.g., denominational), local contextual factors (population shifts, industry closing), and local institutional factors (issues in the local church that discourage new members⁵ and retention of current members).

In 1972, Dean Kelley had written “Why Conservative Churches are Growing”. His argument was a psychological one. He suggested that people needed a sense of commitment and that Mainline churches were generally culturally supportive while conservative churches made theological and behavioral demands on their members. Needless to say, conservatives loved the argument.

Sociologists, for the most part, did not.

Hoge and Roozen’s book served as a response to Kelley (which is why they close the book with a commentary from Kelley). One essay written by Hoge examined various theories for why decline started. He settled on two conclusions: lower birth rates among Mainlines and “deeper value shifts among young people”. In their conclusion, they again restate the national factors, both institutional and contextual, as the principal drivers of decline. Interestingly, their national contextual factor identifies “cultural polarization” as key.⁶

One book that I no longer have that I mentioned to Ryan on Twitter was Jeffrey Hadden’s “The Gathering Storm in the Churches”. His research suggested a major chasm between the political attitudes of Mainline clergy in the early 1970s and those of their laity. The clergy, as a professional seminary trained group, were much more active in the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements. The laity didn’t approve of their activism and didn’t want such issues addressed in sermons.⁷

I should mention that research done by Michele Margolis and Ruth Braunstein suggest that contemporary politics is sorting people into their religious identities and pushing young people and progressive away from more evangelical congregations. Part of the growth in the Nones is the reverse of Hadden’s argument from the 1970s.

Another book that has remained in my library all these years in “American Mainline Religion: It’s Changing Shape and Future” by Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney written in 1987. Roof and McKinney explore a version of “religious families” that is pretty common today. One difference in their conceptualization is that they separate Liberal Protestants (Episcopalians, United Church of Christ, and Presbyterians) from Moderate Protestants (Methodists, Lutherans, Disciples of Christ, American Baptists, and Reformed).⁸

They wrote about the differences between the Liberal Protestants and the Moderates:

Compared to old-line liberal Protestants, moderate Protestants have not had as much access to power or occupied as privileged a status in the national ethos. Their claims to being mainline have rested instead on their close ties with the people and their fundamental, grass-roots values — the ideals and standards implicit in the common American creed. Moderate Protestants are more conservative in their doctrinal beliefs and social attitudes than liberal Protestants and tend to reflect more majority American opinions and views. While tending toward the middle, these constituencies, by virtue of their size, necessarily include a wide range of outlooks and opinions. Diversity in religious belief and practice and solid middle-class social location makes this group someone more vulnerable to the ebb and flow of popular opinion in mainstream America. (89)

Toward the end of the book, Roof and McKinney argue that conservative Protestants (evangelicals) moved from the periphery to the center and liberal Protestants (the old Mainline) moved from the center to the periphery. They then suggest that moderate Protestants have a possibility of “redefining the center”:

Pressures on moderate Protestantism to move more sharply to the ideological left or right are considerable and may increase in the future. If this is the case, the decades ahead could be trying ones for moderate Protestantism. These are the folks who occupy the middle ground of American life — geographically, politically, and culturally — whose sympathies are not wholly with either the Moral Majority or the Immoral Minority, but who play a significant part in shaping the nation’s future. In a very real way, the future of the nation’s religious establishment rests with this constituency. (243)

At one point in the book, they argue that Methodists are the “mainline of the mainline”. Certainly their analysis of the moderate Protestants rings true with the recent history of the United Methodist Church.

I learned in Sunday’s sermon that Albert Outler’s “Wesleyan Quadralateral” was developed to help with the troubled merger between the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren, which created the UMC. That made me very curious as to the percentage of congregations that disaffiliated to join the new Global Methodist Church had their roots as EUB congregations.

One other book that I frequently come back to is relatively more recent. Written in 2010, Robert Putnam and David Campbell’s “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us” uses one of my favorite metaphors in evaluating American religion over the last six decades. They say that American religion was hit by an earthquake and two aftershocks. The earthquake was what they call “the long sixties”, involving the pill, student attitudes, civil rights, Roe v. Wade, and women entering the workforce in larger numbers.⁹ The first aftershock was the growth of the evangelical movement as a reaction against those changes. The second aftershock was the growth of the Nones, especially among the young.

It’s too soon to know, but I wonder if we’re in the midst of a third aftershock. The alignment of much of evangelicalism with conservative politics, the crises of sexual abuse in evangelical and Catholic churches, fights over the role of women, and attitudes toward LGBTQIA+ populations might simply continue the dominance of the Nones.

Yet it might just provide the space for the Moderate Mainline to reclaim its role as the center of American religion. Progressive evangelicals (yes, they exist) want an engagement with issues of the broader culture without moving away from their theological grounding. Mainliners want a more spiritually grounded, scriptural informed, and theologically literate approach to their cultural engagement.

I know it’s an optimistic vision, but I think it’s still possible. In that light, the last four decades of crisis in the United Methodist Church (as well as other denominations) might be setting the stage for what’s next. I can only hope.

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1. FYI: I’m now on Threads @jwhawthorne1954.

2. I can’t write that sentence without mentioning “White Flight”

3. With Contemporary Music involving drums and guitars!

4. They were using membership data. Ryan was using self-id in the General Social Survey.

5. A reminder that my 1986 dissertation was about people who have attended church at least once a month for over six months but don’t join. One of the national contextual factors is swapping belonging for official affiliation.

6. Glad we got over that!

7. Hoge and Roozen dismiss Hadden’s argument because the decline started prior to those social movements.

8. There are conservative versions of Presybterians, Lutherans, and Reformed which wouldn’t fit the criteria of Mainlines.

9. Whatever MAGA means, it often suggests some idyllic time before the earthquake.