Old, nagging conflicts will continue to dominate religion news in the coming year

Yes, there will be a hotly contested U.S. election in 2022. And pretty much every secular and religious faction is keyed up awaiting the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on whether to revise or revoke its rulings that legalized abortion.

Big decisions like this typically land in late June.

Other lingering disputes on the news coverage agenda include the following.

* As the U.S. Senate struggles with a rewrite of the Catholic President Joe Biden's elephantine social-spending bill, the Catholic bishops' conference vehemently opposes any inclusion of abortion funding.

The bishops, along with Orthodox Judaism's synagogue union, also fear (.pdf here) this law will cripple funding for widespread religious preschools. In yet another church-state debate, Biden hopes to end religious exemption from anti-discrimination rules, which went into effect in January.

* Inside the world of Mainline Protestantism, the unending dispute over the Bible and LGBTQ+ issues may produce the biggest U.S. church split since the Civil War at the United Methodist Church's General Conference. Early in 2022, a commission must decide whether the twice-postponed conference, now scheduled for August 29-September 6 in Minneapolis, can finally occur despite two years of COVID-related snarls and, some say, stalling by the UMC establishment.

* The T in LGBTQ won new Methodist attention as just-retired Pennsylvania Bishop Peggy Johnson and her husband, a Methodist pastor, publicized the latter's gender transition while identifying publicly as a "cisgender" male.

Last March, a sizable body of U.S. conservatives announced plans to leave the denomination and unite with former mission churches overseas — primarily in Africa and Asia — to form the "Global Methodist Church," led temporarily by Virginia Pastor Keith Boyette (540-898-4960).

Future scenarios emerge as the media debate the health of U.S. Mainline Protestantism

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."