Can mainline liberals get their story back?

In my most recent column I drew attention to the certainty gap between American evangelicals and mainline Protestants. While 85% of evangelicals and 82% of Black Protestants believe in God without a shadow of a doubt, the same can only be said for 56% of mainline Protestants. 

I also noted the slice of evangelicals who express no doubts about God is almost exactly the same as the percentage who voted for Donald Trump. The same correspondence applies to mainline Protestants: 56% have no doubts about God; 58% voted for Trump in 2024. 

The “God gap” between Democrats and Republicans is real and growing. In 1990, a recent study reveals, about 65% of both major parties claimed to have no doubts about God’s existence. By 2020, 70% of Republicans had no questions about God, while only 40% of Democrats could say the same. 

Since most Black Protestants identify as Democrats, the loss of religious certainty among white Democrats is more severe than these numbers suggest. 

Have mainline Protestants failed to tell a good story?

Why do 44% of mainline Protestants express a measure of doubt on the God question? Should this be taken as a symptom of malaise or even a spiritual sickness?

In her recently published Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, Molly Worthen suggests mainline Protestant denominations have declined in recent decades because they “failed to tell a good story.” 

In Worthen’s account, “respectable liberal clergy in the most distinguished pulpits” shared the same fate as “Cold War technocrats and professors, the Washington brain trusts” and “sensible public intellectuals” who believed that promises of progress and prosperity could replace “the cosmic assurance” of “the old enchantments.” 

A charismatic story makes sense of the world; it binds a people to a leader and a leader to a people.

Since Spellbound traces the role of charisma in American life, mainline Protestants rarely enter the frame. In her understanding, “charisma” is rooted in a story that reconfigures the fears, hopes and passions of a particular people in novel and liberating fashion. A charismatic story makes sense of the world; it binds a people to a leader and a leader to a people. Charisma, in Worthen’s usage, isn’t about glamor, wit, eloquence or sex appeal; it’s about storytelling. 

The origins of the Protestant mainline

The American Protestant mainline denominations were shaped by the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the 1920s, which pitted stalwart defenders of the old evangelical story against liberals hellbent on revising that story. The old story revolved around heaven and hell. If you want to land in heaven, you must accept Jesus Christ as your Savior. Those who fail this test will face the wrath of a holy God. No exceptions.

In the late decades of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th, American Protestants sent thousands of highly educated, multilingual and passionate men and women to Africa, Asia and Latin America “to preach the gospel to the heathen.” Surrounded on every side by millions of people who appeared to be perfectly happy with the faith they were raised in, American Protestant missionaries confronted a crisis. Could a gracious and loving God consign all these people to the fires of hell? Were non-Christian faiths utterly devoid of value? 

Over a period of decades, liberal Protestant missionaries cobbled together a new spiritual vision. Indigenous churches on “the mission field” should be self-governing. American denominations should stop competing with one another. Christians from America should stop trying to evangelize people of non-Christian faith and start learning from them. The emphasis shifted from conversion to service. 

Mid-century dominance

Returning to America, liberal missionaries filled high-level leadership roles in higher education and denominational life. Fluency in foreign languages and their familiarity with geopolitical reality gave them access to the corridors of federal power. Of course, most American missionaries continued to preach the old heaven-hell orthodoxy, but compared to their liberal counterparts, they lacked social influence.  

Mainline Protestant churches were bursting with members. Most presidents and congressional leaders were affiliated with one of the mainline denominations, and theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich were featured on the cover of Time magazine. 

“In God We Trust” was printed on American money, and “under God” was added to the pledge of allegiance. In the postwar struggle against “Godless communism,” an ecumenical form of Christian Nationalism took shape.

If Billy Graham wanted maximum buy-in for his crusades, he had to bring liberal mainline churches to the table.

In this new Christian story, a fusion of science and enlightened religion was expected to usher in a new age of peace and prosperity. In this vision, ethics trumped orthodoxy. The old-time religion wasn’t abandoned, but the emphasis shifted from eternal destiny to the practical and political issues of everyday life. If Billy Graham wanted maximum buy-in for his crusades, he had to bring liberal mainline churches to the table.   

The civil rights movement and the clergy-laity divide

The civil rights movement changed everything. Martin Luther King Jr challenged liberal Christians to follow the logic of their own faith story. He wondered how liberal white Christians could square their ethical vision with the horrors of Jim Crow segregation. He asked: Are we all part of the family of God, or are we not?  

Worthen’s “respectable liberal clergy in the most distinguished pulpits,” generally warmed to King’s challenge, as did the faculty of mainline Protestant seminaries and most prominent denominational leaders. 

But the people in the pews of mainline churches were less enthusiastic about King’s challenge; especially when support for civil rights became entangled with opposition to the war in Vietnam. The much-lamented clergy-laity divide in mainline churches is rooted in the turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s. Today, while 49% of mainline clergy vote Democrat and only 14% side with the Republicans, 58% of mainline Protestants voted for Donald Trump. 

The loss of a shared story

Most evangelical preachers know if they stick to “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved” and emphasize traditional family values, they are on safe ground. As a consequence, they emphasize a simple story week after week. 

Since most mainline Protestant pastors preach to an unwieldy mix of traditional Republicans and liberal Democrats, they learn to avoid hot topics. Take a thinly veiled swipe at MAGA religion, and the conservatives will take offense. Endorse the tenets of traditional sexual morality, and the liberals will be in revolt. Contrast the glories of heaven and the agonies of hell, and you will be greeted with general incomprehension.  

The only version of American Christianity enjoying rapid growth in today’s religious market is a controversial blending of MAGA politics and Pentecostal supernaturalism.

In recent years, the once-robust growth of American evangelical Christianity has slowed considerably. The only version of American Christianity enjoying rapid growth in today’s religious market is a controversial blending of MAGA politics and Pentecostal supernaturalism. That is the kind of religion that sparked the capitol insurrection Jan. 6, 2021. 

In the closing chapters of Spellbound, Worthen sifts through the MAGA garbage dump in search for a few gems of positive spirituality. She doesn’t come up with much.  

Can the liberal mainline find a shared faith story?   

Can mainline liberals get their story back? This issue is personal for me because the Baptist church I attend has gradually evolved into a mainline congregation. The process has been painful. We have lost a lot of stalwart members and have welcomed an equal number of Christian pilgrims, many of them exiles from MAGA religion. 

Can the Protestant mainline be sorted into the two groups I have sketched out — a little over 50% who are resigned to the MAGA revolution and have no doubts about God, and a little under 50% who resist MAGA authoritarianism and sometimes wonder if the world is in the hands of a loving God? Is the divide that stark and that simple?

Maybe not, but the mainline Protestant world is fracturing along these lines. Consider the recent defection of the Global Methodist Church from the United Methodists. Similar splits have occurred in Episcopal and Presbyterian life. My congregation is affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, an increasingly progressive group of exiles from the Southern Baptist Convention. 

Learning from the past

Let me suggest the liberal slice of American Protestantism confronts the same social reality our liberal missionaries faced a century ago. We find ourselves in a world where most people are either comfortable with the faith tradition they were raised in or have scant interest in organized religion of any sort. 

A Pew study this year indicates only 62% of Americans identify as Christian. That’s down from 90% as recently as 1990. If you live in a small Southern town, it might appear America is as overwhelmingly Christian as it was in the halcyon days of mainline dominance in the 1950s. But if you live in one of America’s major cities, the days of Christianity’s cultural dominance are clearly over. 

In an America in which fewer people identify as Christian, more people practice a non-Christian faith, and interest in religion, especially among the young, has declined significantly, it may seem sensible to abandon the decision-making process to secular elites. Democrats and left-leaning Christians particularly are attracted to this solution. In sharp contrast, the Trump administration seems determined to diminish the influence of non-MAGA elites whenever and wherever possible. 

A religion that divides the world into eschatological winners and losers is naturally drawn to the president who consigns his enemies to the outer darkness.

It should surprise no one that white American evangelicals comprise the most enthusiastic segment of Trump’s fan base. A religion that divides the world into eschatological winners and losers is naturally drawn to the president who consigns his enemies to the outer darkness. Political and religious expressions of a win-lose dualism were bound to meet in rapturous embrace. This romance will not end well.

A “common sacred worldview”

The most promising path to a revised liberal mainline faith story comes from an unlikely source. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, spiritual leader of the world’s 300 million Orthodox Christians, is based in Istanbul, Turkey. Istanbul — known as Constantinople before the rise of Islam — was to the Orthodox East what Rome has been to the Catholic West. 

Much like the liberal American missionaries who found themselves surrounded by vast non-Christian populations a century ago, Patriarch Bartholomew inhabits a tiny Christian island in a Muslim ocean. 

Bartholomew has responded to his constricted circumstances by reaching out to Catholic, Muslim and Jewish faith leaders, championing the theology of creation care, and standing with Ukraine in the face of a cruel invasion backed by the Russian Orthodox Church. 

In a speech before the World Council of Religions for Peace in Istanbul, the ecumenical patriarch called for people of faith to embrace a “common sacred worldview.” Bartholomew wasn’t suggesting the great religious traditions of the world should be scrapped in favor of a new vision. He realizes Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists disagree profoundly. He wants all people of faith to celebrate their own traditions, customs and beliefs. 

Bartholomew fears that if we leave major policy decisions solely in the hands of secular experts, we will remain captive to a “materialism with a character of reductive simplification, a way of viewing the real that contracts human flourishing to its material dimension, systematically excluding any reference to the sacred.” 

The patriarch embraces the contributions of the scientific community as blessings from God. In fact, he believes religious discourse can be enriched by dialogue with cutting-edge science. God is Lord of all that is. But because scientists restrict themselves to the “what” of the universe, they are unable to grapple effectively with why-questions. 

“The encounter of the different religious traditions, each one a bearer of a unique experience of the sacred, becomes the necessary condition for the confrontation with a globalized meaninglessness, for the re-articulation of a discourse that dares to speak of love, compassion, mercy, forgiveness and self-sacrifice not as abstract moral values, but as active elements of a fuller reality,” Bartholomew stressed.

“Love, compassion, mercy, forgiveness and self-sacrifice” are transcendent virtues, shared broadly by the religious community, and necessarily alien to the scientific project. The ravages of war, disease, economic injustice, ecological devastation and the climate crisis can only be addressed by a spiritually informed science and a scientifically informed spirituality. 

Green shoots

At their best, mainline Protestants of America have been calling for a “common sacred worldview” for more than a century. But this message has rarely made the hard journey from elite circles to the pew. Can this vision become our shared faith story?

I am not suggesting mainline Protestants should scrap Christian particularities for a newfangled interfaith mishmash. The Scriptures and the lordship of Christ must remain central to our witness. But precisely as confessing Christians, we are perfectly placed to spark a new conversation between people of faith, the scientific community and policy makers. 

I’m not suggesting that nurturing a “common sacred worldview” will fill mainline sanctuaries or resolve our financial crisis. It won’t. But I believe this is where God is leading us. And if God is leading, we would be wise to follow. 

 

Alan Bean leads Friends of Justice based in Fort Worth, Texas, where he is a member of Broadway Baptist Church.

   

Related articles:

Making sense of denominational decline and church shifting

A week at Chautauqua has me pondering the future of the Protestant mainline

Both mainline Christians and evangelicals lost relevance by seeking power, podcast emphasizes