The surveys about mainline Protestantism just keep coming and coming. And — this might not be news to you — the results of those surveys keep getting worse and worse.
Ryan Burge, religious pollster extraordinaire, chimed in with one last week. It seems that in the denominations traditionally labeled mainline Protestant, according to samples collected by the General Social Survey, the percentage of members in the 18-to-35-year range is 1.7 percent.
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That is, members in the prime baby-making years constitute less than 2 percent of the membership of seven historic Protestant denominations — American Baptist Church, United Presbyterian Church (PCUSA), United Methodist Church (UMC), United Church of Christ (UCC), Episcopal Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), and Disciples of Christ. That’s down from nearly 10 percent in 1975, 7.5 percent in 1990, and 3.5 percent in 2004.
Compare that with the beyond-baby-making quadrant of two of those church bodies — the Episcopal Church and the PCUSA. Half of the Episcopal membership is over 65 years old; as for the Presbyterians, 58 percent are 56 or older (one-third are over 70).
I think it’s safe to say the back pews of those old churches won’t be filled with fussy, crying babies anytime soon. Neither will those denominations be growing themselves organically out of their historic membership malaise.
I doubt it’s even crossed their mind as a church-growth strategy. Unlike my church, the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS), which recently paid a consultant big bucks to do a survey and recommend that the answer to the church’s declining membership problem was to encourage its members to have more babies. I’ll keep you posted on how that’s working.
Make no mistake: More babies would help all U.S. churches, especially the mainline. But the nation as a whole is already trailing the 2.1-child-per-woman replacement rate as it is (we’re at 1.7 kids per woman). And the traditional liberal disenchantment with repeopling the planet isn’t helping that number one bit.
Opinion varies on whether, and how, the Seven Sisters of the Mainline, as they’ve been called, can reverse their slump. But there is no denying that mainline membership is dropping — it’s falling off the table like a Sandy Koufax curveball. The numbers are cataclysmic. According to the Ready to Harvest YouTube channel, the Disciples of Christ leads the way, dropping a staggering 57.25 percent in membership from 2000 to 2020. But the other six sisters are almost as anemic — from 2000 to 2020, the PCUSA plummeted 50.68 percent; the UCC, 43 percent; the ELCA, 38.6 percent; the Episcopal Church, 32.42 percent; the UMC, 24.4 percent; and the American Baptist Church, 21.7 percent. By contrast, the Amish, who double in population every 20 years, had in 2022 exceeded the Disciples of Christ, numbering 373,000 members to the Disciples’ 350,000.
All manner of reasons has been proffered for this stark decline. These churches, like all others, are suffering a hit from the secularization of society. The new generations, millennials and Gen Z, hold much less interest in organized religion than do their elders, as the dramatic rise of the “nones” attests. The number of people with no religious affiliation in America has jumped from 16 percent in 2007 to 29 percent in 2021. Fewer people joining churches in general means fewer people joining mainline churches.
And the ones they are joining eschew the denominational label. Said Daniel Silliman in Christianity Today in 2022, “If ‘nondenominational’ were a denomination, it would be the largest Protestant one, claiming more than 13 percent of churchgoers in America.”
Another reason for the mainline decline is simple demographics — members in mainline churches are older than those in other groups, and more of them are going out the door (into the cemetery) than are coming in.
Commented Burge, about the PCUSA situation:
10,000 coming into adulthood, 25,000 dying in the PCUSA in an average year. Of course there are other ways to join or leave a denomination, but these two figures are pointing toward a future where the denomination has to “find” an additional 15,000 members a year just to offset the losses from death. That’s a whole lot of headwinds.
Apart from demographic loss, there’s no denying the pews started emptying when these mainline churches jumped with both feet onto the gay agenda. When the mainline began ordaining non-celibate LGBTQ clergy and performing gay weddings, they launched an exodus in members, many of those fleeing to new, spinoff, reactive denominations within their theological tradition.
The PCUSA approval of ordaining non-celibate homosexuals in 2010 spawned a new conservative Presbyterian denomination. The ELCA approval of the same in 2009 also resulted in the formation of the North American Lutheran Church in 2010 and pumped new blood into the already-existing Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ, which was up to 960 congregations by 2020. The Episcopal Church has its own spinoff body, caused also by the sexual adventurism of the old church. And the Methodists, more even than the other groups, spent four long years in contentious argle-bargle and eventually split, losing about 25 percent of its member churches, over the LGBTQ question. The gay agenda may not have precipitated the decline in these bodies, but it certainly pummeled them on the slide down. (RELATED from Tom Raabe: Conservative Methodist Exit Nears End Point)
As much as liberals attempt to universalize the decline by pointing to membership drops in conservative church bodies — the Southern Baptist Convention has shrunk by 11.7 percent from 2000 to 2020, and the LCMS by 27 percent — they can’t avoid the fact that some conservative bodies have gained members. The Assemblies of God have jumped by 26.5 percent from 2000 to 2020, and the Presbyterian Church in America has risen by 25 percent in the same time period. No mainline church can boast growth of any degree in that time span.
One other survey presents even more troubling data. According to a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) from September of last year:
More than seven in ten mainline clergy (72%) say they are optimistic about the future of their church. The rate of optimism is similar across denominations, including 78% of PCUSA, 74% of Episcopal, 72% of UM, 70% of ELCA, 69% of ABCUSA, 69% of DOC, and 67% of UCC clergy.
Based on those numbers, the mainline churches have more to worry about than the lack of babies.
