“The periphery is now the mainline, and the mainline is the sideline”

Why does the media still call certain denominations “mainline” and continue to assume of them an influence they no longer have? And what caused the mainline denominations to become sideline organizations?

The respected and provocative religion scholar, Rodney Stark, has been researching those questions for a new book. I’ve read three of his books (Cities of God, The Rise of Christianity, and God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades). Patheos interviewed Stark, co-director for the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University, about his findings. Excerpts:

When I was very young, there was a Protestant mainline and they were the Congregationalists, the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, American Baptists, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and more recently the media would include the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Once in a while they would even stretch things far enough to include the Unitarians and Quakers. These were the high prestige denominations, and when people became prominent and successful they would shed their old denomination and join one of these.

Now, the belief that these are the mainline denominations simply won't go away. Everyone keeps pretending that these are the folks that count. But the fact is: that's ancient history.

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These denominations have continued to lose members at an incredible rate, and they're tiny now compared to what they were, say, in 1960. Yet one keeps hearing about the "mainline" denominations and this "periphery" called evangelicalism. Well, the periphery is now the mainline, and the mainline is the sideline.

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Jeffrey Hadden published a book in 1968 called The Gathering Storm in the Churches. He understood what was happening. He said that a big gap has opened up between the pulpit and the pews. It has two dimensions. One is religious -- the people in the pulpit are no longer really men of God. And the other is political -- the people behind the pulpit are very much men of the Left, and most of the people in the pews are not.

The upshot of this, he anticipated, was going to be the continuing decline of the so-called mainline denominations. And what he said was true. The decline has continued. I believe the Episcopalians lost another 3 percent last year. These have become small, not very important denominations.

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There are congregations within these denominations that are growing very impressively, very quickly, very strongly. Guess what? They have evangelical clergy.

When asked what he thinks about “progressive evangelicals” such as Jim Wallis of Sojourners, he said:

The only thing I wonder is why he claims to be an evangelical. Except that he gets much more attention. If he did not claim to be evangelical, he would just be another liberal Christian. But this way, he gets to be the media's favorite evangelical. Martin Marty will invite him to the banquet.

A colleague of mine, Byron Johnson, and one of his graduate students, just published a study in which they look at whether the evangelical commitment to social conservatism is breaking down. Jim Wallis and his ilk want to claim that young people are all wising up and moving his way. So Byron Johnson and his student look at some large data sets of self-identified evangelicals.

They don't find anything of the sort. Of course, the media want evangelicals to become liberals, so they will jump on any speck of evidence that anybody produces. But the evangelical commitment on what are called the cultural issues is just as strong and just as conservative as ever.

Read the whole thing.