Surveys & polls

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Any kind of turnaround for 'Mainline' Protestantism would be big news, but is it true? 

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Any kind of turnaround for 'Mainline' Protestantism would be big news, but is it true? 

One danger facing religion-beat veterans is that a broad trend becomes so familiar we overlook its continuing journalistic importance. One example is the year-by-year-by-year decline of America's once-influential "Mainline" Protestant churches over the past half-century, even as conservative or "Evangelical" Protestants generally kept up with population growth -- until recently.

(For additional background, please note that the June 24 Guy Memo lamented media neglect of Mainline angles in spot news coverage. See also this recent Ryan Burge post.)

The Mainline shrinkage is one of this era's momentous changes in American religion, a great void in the public square into which evangelicals moved. Other major trends include the substantial rise of unaffiliated "nones," immigration-driven increases in Hispanic Catholics and followers of Asian religions, and white Catholics' shift from loyal Democrats to pivotal Republican constituency.

It's big stuff if that Mainline Protestant slide has bottomed out or that’s any kind of upswing. And what if Mainliners now suddenly outnumber the rival white Evangelicals (leaving aside the distinctive Black and Hispanic Evangelicals). Such is the scenario in a major new survey released July 8 by the Public Religion Research Institute (contacts at press@prri.org or 202-238-9424).

PRRI tells us that white Mainliners are now 16.4% of the U.S. population, a remarkable gain from 13% as recently as 2016, while white Evangelicals have fallen to 14.5% from a 23% peak in 2006. White Catholics constitute a pretty stable 11.7%.

Politically, Mainliners are divided and thus have less clout than other groups, identifying as 35% Democrats, 33% Republicans, and 30% Independents.

As journalists ponder what to make of this surprising report, begin with what's “Mainline” in the church marketplace. The Guy (and others) say the word designates those Protestant denominations — the so-called “Seven Sisters” — born in Colonial America or the early Republic, with predominantly white memberships, that are affiliated with the National Council of Churches and are tolerant or favorable toward liberal belief. We could add that the well-educated Mainliners typically enjoy relatively high incomes and social status.

Here is the key: This PRRI survey at hand identified Mainliners by what they are not instead of what they are.


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These stark numbers are headline worthy: Death of the Episcopal Church is approaching

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These stark numbers are headline worthy: Death of the Episcopal Church is approaching

Last November, I wrote a post for Religion in Public with the title, “The Data is Clear — Episcopalians are in Trouble.” In it, I used survey data to paint a portrait of a denomination that was on the brink of collapse.

One of the most troubling things about the future of the Episcopal Church is that the average member is incredibly old. The median age of an Episcopalian in 2019 was sixty-nine years old. With life expectancy around 80, we can easily expect at least a third of the current membership of the denomination to be gone in the next fifteen or twenty years. That’s problematic when membership has already been plummeting for decades.

But, I came across some data in the last few weeks that I just had to look at in more depth.

Before I get into the graphs I have to give some serious kudos to the data team that works for the denomination. I have looked at the websites of all kinds of Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian and Catholic traditions over the last few years. The Episcopalians blow them all out of the water in terms of accessibility and ease of use.

Don’t believe me? Well, they have an interactive dashboard of all their churches in the United States. You can sort based on a map, church size, or amount of offering. It’s incredible and can be accessed at this link.

Let’s get down to it, though. How many people actually attend an Episcopal church on an average Sunday? I grabbed a PDF of their membership reports from here and did some quick analysis of the national trends.

In 2009, 725,000 people attended an Episcopal church on an average weekend. According to their own data, the Episcopal Church has about 1.8 million baptized members. (The denomination’s membership peaked at 3.4 million in the 1960s.) Thus, about 40% of current members attend on a regular basis. That’s been declining steadily over the last decade. A typical year sees attendance dip by 25,000-35,000 people. That represents a 2-3% year-over-year decline.

By 2019, the weekly attendance was 547,000. In percentage terms, the Episcopalians have seen their attendance drop by a quarter in just the last decade.

But, that doesn’t tell the whole story about the future of the Episcopalians.


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Scouting membership numbers collapse: AP totally ignores role of religion in this drama

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Scouting membership numbers collapse: AP totally ignores role of religion in this drama

It’s the question that I have been trying to answer for 40 years or so: Why do news organizations ignore basic religion facts and trends when it is clear they are relevant in a major news story?

Ever since the first GetReligion post, back in 2004, we’ve been talking about religion “ghosts” in mainstream news coverage. Some “ghosts” are rather subtle and, frankly, it’s easy to understand why journalists with zero religion-beat experience would miss some facts and trends linked to religious law, history or doctrine.

But then you have “ghosts” — super ghosts, maybe — that are much, much more obvious and harder to explain. Consider, for example, the Associated Press story that came out the other day with this headline: “Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts suffer huge declines in membership.” Here’s the overture:

America’s most iconic youth organizations — the Boy Scouts of America and the Girl Scouts of the USA — have been jolted by unprecedented one-year drops in membership, due partly to the pandemic, and partly to social trends that have been shrinking their ranks for decades.

While both organizations insist they’ll survive, the dramatic declines raise questions about how effectively they’ll be able to carry out their time-honored missions. … Membership for the BSA’s flagship Cub Scouts and Scouts BSA programs dropped from 1.97 million in 2019 to 1.12 million in 2020, a 43% plunge, according to figures provided to The Associated Press. Court records show membership has fallen further since then, to about 762,000.

Other than the COVID-19 crisis, what else caused this massive drop?

Reasons for the drop include competition from sports leagues, a perception by some families that they are old-fashioned, and busy family schedules. The pandemic brought a particular challenge.

Wait a minute. Parents were worried that the Scouts are “old-fashioned,” which implies that Scouting would be growing if its leaders made more efforts to modernize their methods and beliefs?

Then again, maybe it would help if the story mentioned decisions by leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to cut ties to the Boy Scouts (click here for AP story on that bombshell) because of changes linked to gender and sexuality in the name of becoming more modern and, well, woke? Not that long ago, LDS congregations hosted 37% of all Scout troops. At the same time, many — perhaps most — Southern Baptist Convention churches have dropped out of Scouting for the same reasons.


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Don't neglect Mainline Protestants when analyzing, e.g., sexual abuse or Baptist turmoil

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Don't neglect Mainline Protestants when analyzing, e.g., sexual abuse or Baptist turmoil

Two blockbusters dominated the American religion beat last week.

The Catholic bishops defied a nudge from Pope Francis's Vatican and decided overwhelmingly to write a Communion policy that might target President Joe Biden and other pols for liberal abortion stances. And conservative establishment voters in a Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) presidential showdown narrowly defeated (for now) hard-right populists.

Standard news judgment automatically puts the spotlight on hot disputes in the nation's two largest religious sectors — white evangelicalism and Catholicism. Meanwhile, week by week, year by year, the media consistently downplay the third-ranking religious category, "Mainline" Protestantism, which not so long ago exercised such vast cultural influence. (They also neglect fourth-ranking Black Protestantism.)

Two thoughtful new articles show intriguing ways to overcome sins of omission.

President Mark Tooley of the conservative Institute on Religion & Democracy asks, at the Juicy Ecumenism weblog, why Mainline churches apparently suffer fewer sexual abuse scandals than their evangelical rivals. And University of West Georgia historian Daniel K. Williams compares the turbulent Southern Baptists with their smaller and rarely covered Mainline rival, American Baptist Churches (ABC). [Disclosure: The Guy was happily raised in the ABC and remained a nominal member till age 30.]

"Mainline" refers to church bodies dating from Colonial and post-Revolutionary times that have been predominantly white, involved in ecumenical groups like the National Council of Churches and are either liberal on theology and politics or give liberals ample running room. The largest such denominations — often called the “Seven Sisters” — are the ABC, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Episcopal Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Presbyterian Church (USA), United Church of Christ and United Methodist Church.

Tooley is a Methodist evangelical and major critic of liberal trends, so when he faintly praises Mainline performance this commands attention.


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Weekend thinking: Concerning Southern Baptists and the fracturing of evangelicalism

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Weekend thinking: Concerning Southern Baptists and the fracturing of evangelicalism

All together now: Can the word “evangelical” be defined in doctrinal terms or is it time to admit that “evangelical” is a political term and that’s that?

A related question: Is the war between the alleged “woke” conservatives and the “real” conservatives in the Southern Baptist Convention based on serious disagreements about essential Christian doctrines or leftover resentments and anger from the 2016 rise of Donald Trump?

The way I see things, religion-beat pros can do some groundbreaking research on these questions this coming week during the SBC’s tense national meetings in Nashville.

If you have been following SBC life for a half-century or so, you know that what goes around comes around. Only this time it is really, really hard to find concrete doctrinal differences between the generals in the two warring camps. That was the subject of this week’s GetReligion podcast: “Will SBC politicos answer questions about doctrinal clashes in this new war?”

But here is one more question for this weekend: Is there anything really new about this conflict?

A fascinating piece at MereOrthodoxy.com — “The Six Way Fracturing of Evangelicalism” — believes that we are watching a religious and cultural earthquake that will change evangelicalism forever. The piece was written by the Rev. Skyler Flowers of Grace Bible Church in Oxford, Miss., a graduate of Reformed Theological Seminary.

Before I point out a few crucial pieces of that puzzle, I’d like — once again — to flash back to a 1987 interview I did with the Rev. Billy Graham, a man who knew a thing or two about evangelicalism. I asked him: “What does the word ‘evangelical’ mean?”

"Actually, that's a question I'd like to ask somebody, too," he said, during a 1987 interview in his mountainside home office in Montreat, N.C. This oft-abused term has "become blurred. ... You go all the way from the extreme fundamentalists to the extreme liberals and, somewhere in between, there are the evangelicals."

The key, he argued, is that “evangelical” needed to be understood:


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Many pieces in this news puzzle: New Israeli coalition reflects land's complex religiosity

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Many pieces in this news puzzle: New Israeli coalition reflects land's complex religiosity

What does it say about Israel that its founding prime minister was someone who today might be labeled a “BuJew,” a Jew strongly attracted to Buddhist philosophy? Or that it took Israel more than 70 years to produce a prime minister who identifies with Orthodox Judaism?

The BuJew prime minister was, of course, the otherwise secular David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s George Washington equivalent. Ben-Gurion actually took several days during a 1961 two-week state visit to Burma (today’s Myanmar) to attend a Buddhist retreat. I can’t imagine an Israeli prime minister doing that today given the Jewish state’s current political turmoil and Orthodoxy’s influence.

The first Orthodox prime minister is set to be Naftali Bennett, who as of this writing is scheduled to command the top spot in Israel’s nascent anti-Netanyahu governing coalition, itself tentatively set to formally assume office within days.

Again, what does all of this say? A lot, I’d argue, about Israel’s religious complexity and the degree to which religion and politics are tightly intertwined, perhaps inseparably so, in Israel (and the Middle East in general, but that’s a larger topic for another day).

I’d also argue it underscores the importance for journalists opining on Israel to be well versed on its religious politics — from its varied and often antagonistic Jewish factions, to its distinctive Arab Muslim, Christian and Druse communities — if they are to adequately explain the thinking that goes into Israeli decision making.

Consider the following. Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, the longtime right-wing prime minister, is a secular Jew, as are most Israeli Jews. Yet he nonetheless enjoyed the support of his nation’s ultra-Orthodox parties. Netanyahu gained their support by including the parties in his ruling coalitions, giving them great access and sometimes control over public funds needed for their community institutions and economic safety nets.

Bennett, meanwhile, has gained the condemnation of several leading Orthodox Jews, even though identifies with this religious descriptor.


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Demographics make news: How will religion shape the oncoming Birth Dearth and vice versa?

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Demographics make news: How will religion shape the oncoming Birth Dearth and vice versa?

A Newsweek magazine feature back in 1975 was headlined "The Cooling World." (Journalists beware: The supposed 1977 Time magazine cover story "How to Survive the Coming Ice Age" is among the countless frauds that infest the Internet.)

Eventually, cultural concern shifted instead to "global warming" (which was then rebranded as "climate change").

Seven years before Newsweek's freeze alarm, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich published his apocalyptic "The Population Bomb," which sold in the millions and updated Thomas Malthus's dire demographic predictions from 1798. Ehrlich warned, for example, that due to global overpopulation, in the 1970s "hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." He then helped found the Zero Population Growth organization (since rechristened Population Connection).

Now comes The New York Times with a major page-one May 23 feature headlined "Long Slide Looms for World Population, With Sweeping Ramifications." We're told fertility rates are falling most everywhere except Africa south of the Sahara Desert, and that experts project the first population decline in world history will take hold by the end of this century. Click here for tmatt’s podcast and first take on some of the religion hooks in that story.

Stagnant and shrinking populations will thrill a segment of environmentalists, but these trends also destabilize society — which creates news. Whether with the shared responsibilities families have always assumed, or modern-day governments' social security systems, humanity must have enough younger workers carrying older people to sustain itself.

To keep the population stable, a society needs 2.1 children in the average nuclear family. A survey in The Lancet last year predicted that 183 of the world's 195 nations and territories are on a path to fall below that mark.

The particulars are staggering. The United States is well below that replacement number, and India and Mexico are nearly there, but South Korea has plummeted to a remarkable 0.92.


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Thinking with Ryan Burge: Concerning young Latter-day Saints, third parties and life post-Trump

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Thinking with Ryan Burge: Concerning young Latter-day Saints, third parties and life post-Trump

There are times, when you are reading Ryan Burge on Twitter (which journalists should, of course, be doing) and you see signs that he has read some religion-news related item somewhere that has caused him to do that thing that he does — sift through lots of poll numbers looking for a new angle.

What we have here is a pair of tweets linked to a Christian Sagers think piece at The Deseret News that I had missed. The headline: “Are Latter-day Saint voters turning blue?”

That’s blue as in learning toward the Democratic Party, not feeling sad or depressed. That would be a huge news story hinting at other possible changes among centrists on moral and cultural issues.

Burge send me this comment containing what he thinks is the key question about this possible news twist.

The big question is: have younger LDS really abandoned the Republican Party? I don't think that we will ever know for sure until Trump is off the ballot completely.

So where to begin? Here is the overture in Sager’s piece, noting that a recent:

… Cook Political Report concludes that all four of Utah’s congressional districts are among the most Democratic-trending in the country. Latter-day Saint voters in Arizona doubled their Democratic turnout from 2016.

Meanwhile, a Democratic activist group with whom I spoke recently is optimistic about converting Latter-day Saint women, traditionally Republican, who it believes to be rejecting the GOP in greater percentages than other religious demographics.

That candidate Donald Trump fared so poorly among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 2016 was met with astonishment in national media coverage and a flurry of conjectures that Latter-day Saints were up for grabs.

And yet, the political status of the Latter-day Saint voting bloc doesn’t fit into a tidy narrative. Yes, there are signs that some Latter-day Saints are reconsidering the modern GOP, but at the same time there are suggestions that Latter-day Saints remain reliably Republican.

Sure enough, there are other complications that need to be considered when looking at conservatives in this Donald Trump-warped political age.


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'On Religion' flashback to 1998: Ten years of reporting on a church-state fault line

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'On Religion' flashback to 1998: Ten years of reporting on a church-state fault line

Back in the 1980s, I began to experience deja vu while covering event after event on the religion beat in Charlotte, Denver and then at the national level.

I kept seeing a fascinating cast of characters at events centering on faith, politics and morality. A pro-life rally, for example, would feature a Baptist, a Catholic priest, an Orthodox rabbi and a cluster of conservative Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and Lutherans. Then, the pro-choice counter-rally would feature a "moderate" Baptist, a Catholic activist or two, a Reform rabbi and mainline Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and Lutherans.

Similar line-ups would appear at many rallies linked to gay rights, sex-education programs and controversies in media, the arts and even science. Along with other journalists, I kept reporting that today's social issues were creating bizarre coalitions that defied historic and doctrinal boundaries. After several years of writing about "strange bedfellows," it became obvious that what was once unique was now commonplace.

Then, in 1986, a sociologist of religion had an epiphany while serving as a witness in a church-state case in Mobile, Ala. The question was whether "secular humanism" had evolved into a state-mandated religion, leading to discrimination against traditional "Judeo-Christian" believers. Once more, two seemingly bizarre coalitions faced off in the public square.

"I realized something there in that courtroom. We were witnessing a fundamental realignment in American religious pluralism," said James Davison Hunter of the University of Virginia. "Divisions that were deeply rooted in our civilization were disappearing, divisions that had for generations caused religious animosity, prejudice and even warfare. It was mind- blowing. The ground was moving."

The old dividing lines centered on issues such as the person of Jesus Christ, church tradition and the Protestant Reformation. But these new interfaith coalitions were fighting about something even more basic – the nature of truth and moral authority.


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