I recently read a very incisive and sobering article on the now-decades-long decline of mainline religion in America. The essay is written by Joseph Bottom in the August/September issue of First Things: The Journal of Religion, Culture and Public Life, and is titled “The Death of Protestant America: A Political Theory of the Protestant Mainline” (http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=6254).

 

Historically, the so-called mainline was composed of denominations including my own Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the United Methodist Church, United Church of Christ, and the American Baptist Church, as well as a few other mainstream Protestant groups. What is truly shocking - but necessary - to contemplate is this statistic: in 1965 these Christian mainline groups accounted for well over 50% of the American population. Today, less than 8 percent of Americans belong to these central churches of Protestant Christianity in the USA. The Episcopal Church continues to shrink and represents well less than one percent of our nation’s population.  

 

Why this decline? Joseph Bottom is hardly the first to examine the loss in cultural influence of mainline Protestantism in America. Bottom’s article offers several key reasons, but his central thesis conforms to other writers I have read on this subject: the best predictor of church decline is simply loss of belief. One way we lose belief is to become skeptical of the church’s central truth claims. Another way to lose belief is to fail to pass it on to others through our preaching, teaching, and evangelism, and to our children. 

 

The supreme irony in Bottom’s analysis is that as mainline churches have sought to matter more to the culture, they have given up more of what it is that distinguishes them as Christian communities in ways distinct from the culture, and in the end we have mattered less and less to the culture. In trying so hard to be relevant, we have actually become increasingly irrelevant.

 

The same week I read Bottom’s article, I watched Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, host a televised conversation with Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain at his church. Warren is internationally known for founding Saddleback, an enormous non-denominational congregation, for his best-selling book, The Purpose Driven Life, and for his humanitarian work in Africa. Days after his conversations with Obama and McCain that were watched by millions of Americans, I noticed that Warren was still being interviewed by the national press, and pundits were still talking about these conversations. It made sense that Rick Warren would host such an important cultural event, whatever one may think of his religious views or style (and I have my issues with him here and there). Warren is a very relevant Christian voice in American life, a Christian leader and thinker who understands the culture and has connected with it. 

 

One can imagine that if such an event were held fifty years ago, the kind of church the press would have expected to host would have been an Episcopal or Methodist or Lutheran or Presbyterian church. However, that this summer’s important political conversation was hosted in a non-denominational church ought not to be surprising in the least for thoughtful observers of Christianity and culture.

 

As an Episcopalian, I pause over Bottom’s essay and Rick Warren’s role as a significant Christian leader for our times. What would it look like for healthy mainline congregations to begin asking afresh what it really looks like to matter more to the culture? We might start by remembering that God does not call us first and foremost to be relevant; God calls us to be faithful. In fact, there is no better way to be relevant for these times than to be faithful, even though there is always some cost to us. And being faithful has always required wisdom to understand the other prevailing influences and events that shape cultural life. I believe that wise and mature Christian discipleship calls us always to a thoughtful critique of culture. But we embrace this call not out of a self-righteous or condemning spirit but in order that the world may have life in Jesus’ name.