What has long been called “Mainline” Protestantism suffered inexorable shrinkage this past generation, eroding so much of its once-potent U.S. cultural impact that the news media tend to neglect these moderate-to-liberal churches. Yet a new Public Religion Research Institute poll reported what it argues is a sudden comeback and indicates Mainliners even outnumber the rival conservative "evangelicals" widely thought to dominate Protestantism.
True? The Religion Guy assembled devastating statistics that raise questions about that claim.
U.S. religion's hot number-cruncher Ryan Burge is even more doubtful and notes the Harvard-based Cooperative Election Study found a recent rise in Americans who self-identify as "evangelical."
As reporters ponder that debate, they should also play out longer-term Mainline scenarios, for instance for the Episcopal Church and United Methodist Church.
The hed on another Burge article proclaimed that "The Death of the Episcopal Church is Near."
"I don't think it's an exaggeration at all to believe that Episcopalians will no longer exist by 2040," he contended.
His gloomy forecast relied partly on a stark, candid piece from the blog of the Living Church magazine. It reasoned that annual marriages and baptisms foretell how the denomination will fare. If trends continue, the former would fall from 39,000 in 1980 to 750 as of 2050, and the latter from 56,000 to 2,500, over decades when average worship attendance would plummet from 857,000 to 150,000.
Similarly, in 2019 the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's research agency projected that this now-sizable denomination would dip below 67,000 members by 2050 and average Sunday attendance would hit 16,000 by 2041. Two years before that, Wheaton College's Ed Stetzer notably warned that Mainline Protestantism has "23 Easters left."