Low Church in High Places: The Fate and Future of American Protestantism

American Protestantism is in a bad way. At least, depending on how you define the term “Protestant.”

For many of us, it means “not Catholic.” If we’ve done our church history homework, or pay attention to online theological debates, maybe we mentally add “or Orthodox.” But baked into the name is a protest and that nominal fist is raised squarely at Rome.

There was a time when the umbrella term did some work. Protestants included the heirs of Martin Luther, of John Calvin, of Thomas Cranmer, even of Menno Simons. Later there were break-offs and dissenters—including pietists (Lutherans who cared about the heart), Puritans (Anglicans who cared about the heart), Baptists (one-time Puritans who cared about the heart), and Methodists (are you sensing a pattern?)—but the family, however extended, was still recognizable.

Aside from a small number of exceptions, you could generally count on Protestants to claim the full heritage of the Reformation as their own. They did so by confessing the creed, ascribing supreme authority to the Bible, ordaining their pastors to the ministry of word and sacrament, and (most of the time) baptizing their babies. Fractiousness was less about the program and more about fidelity of execution. If the Protestant revolution was above all a revolution of the heart, then any time the emphasis shifted to the head, to codified doctrines and calcified institutions, it was only a matter of time before new reformers would arise to lay claim to the original vision and start the whole process over again.

This pattern is common to all revolutions and proved reliably cyclical for successive generations of Protestant believers.

What about a more radical vision, though, one that went down to the roots? Europe already contained seeds of such a thoroughgoing transformation, but it wasn’t until the American frontier that they bore lasting fruit. This fruit is, you might say, a third species in the genus of Western Christianity. Neither Catholic nor Protestant, it has taken more than two centuries to come into clear view. It goes by many names, but the best is also the most hotly contested: evangelical.

As I use it, “evangelical” names non-Catholic Christians who are “low church.” By this I mean that evangelicals are:

1) biblicist, meaning the Bible isn’t just chief among many authorities, including church tradition, but the one and only authority;

2) autonomous, meaning their organizational leadership structures are either local or, if trans-local, then voluntary and quite loose;

3) egalitarian, meaning they either do not ordain pastors or, if they do, then the qualifications for and prerogatives of the ministry are modest;

4) entrepreneurial, meaning churches are often analogous to start-up business ventures, founded and led by charismatic individuals who cast a vision for the community;

5) evangelistic, meaning proselytization is high on the agenda, using money, grassroots training, and parachurch ministries to support foreign missions and local efforts at gaining new converts;

6) affective, meaning their piety is focused on the heart, which is more likely to find expression in music, song, and spontaneous spiritual gifts than in robes, rituals, and sacraments.

Note well that these six features all center the individual will, which in turn helps to explain why evangelicals do not baptize their babies. Faith cannot be imposed; it can only be chosen. The same rule applies to local congregations. Evangelicals inhabit a competitive marketplace in which believers vote with their feet. If your church can’t supply decisive reasons why they should stay with you, then rest assured they will be out the door and church shopping in a matter of months.

It’s not hard to grasp what respectable Protestants in the early nineteenth century thought of evangelicals when they first started making noise: at best, ignorant déclassé upstarts; at worst, heretics, nincompoops, and frauds. Despoilers of doctrine, corrupters of tradition, arrogant racketeers of religion pulling the wool over simpletons’ eyes. Would it be better or worse if they actually believed in what they were hawking? No creed, no clergy, no church, just you and the Lord and the Bible and maybe a preacher to bring the three together at a revival.

Fast forward to the present. The reputable Protestants never knew what hit them. Today American Protestantism is all but dead, whereas evangelicalism is alive and, if not exactly well, then certainly kicking. What happened?

Earlier this spring I published an essay for First Things called “Goldilocks Protestantism.” It makes the case that Protestantism as we know it, both nationally and globally, is on life support. The Christian world has become either “high,” meaning catholic, or “low,” meaning evangelical. The one includes bishops and priests, liturgy and tradition, creeds and councils, icons and saints, relics and mystics, Mary and monks, whereas the other includes none of the above. The excluded middle is the Protestantism of the Reformation, a “Goldilocks” Gospel that strives to be neither too high nor too low, but just right. By my reckoning, this style of faith makes up no more than 10 percent of global Christianity. In truth it may be as low as 5 percent, and its numbers continue to decline.

That’s the global story. Now I’d like to focus on the national story. As Hemingway once described the onset of bankruptcy, American Protestantism collapsed slowly, then all at once. Precisely while it was building to an extraordinary, dominating height in the 1960s, its competitors and eventual replacements were growing as well, biding their time. They only had to wait. Termites had long since found their way to the foundation. Once it was destroyed from within, there was no way to reverse the damage. The house was doomed to fall.

Let’s date the pinnacle to the late 1950s. By one estimate, in 1958, more than half of all Americans belonged to a “mainline” Protestant denomination. Think Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Episcopalian. It’s a mistake to wonder how many of these were “actual” as opposed to “nominal” Christians. The social prestige was the point. A prestigious institution is powerful just to the extent that it attracts members regardless of their beliefs. The “mainline” was what you belonged to if you aspired to join—or sought the respect of, or wanted to remain in—the class that ran the country. Presidents, politicians, and businessmen placed formal membership in a known and vetted Protestant denomination. They were neither irreligious nor part of the riffraff (fundamentalists, Pentecostals, Mormons). Like Roman philosophers, their private skepticism and unchristian habits were beside the point: civil religion binds society together. Pay your tithes, say your prayers, make the sacrifices; otherwise the center might not hold.

The center did not hold anyway. Today perhaps fewer than one in ten Americans is a mainline Protestant, and most of them don’t go to church. Demographers predict that in the next dozen years this percentage will trend downward until it settles around one to three percent. So what happened? At this point the story is well told. The best popular books on the subject are Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion, Joseph Bottum’s An Anxious Age, and Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites, all of which build on the work of scholars like Nathan Hatch, George Marsden, Mark Noll, Christian Smith, and David Chappell. Lately we’ve also been well served by sociologists and demographers like Ryan Burge, Stephen Bullivant, and Phil Zuckerman. This only scratches the surface of the research published on the subject.

I’m a theologian and make no claim to originality. In what follows I’d simply like to lift up four themes from these and other works that I find illuminating for understanding the story of American Protestantism, past, present, and future.

Before beginning, though, a caveat is in order. The black church is one of the central institutions of American life and its numbers, although finally showing decline in younger generations, resemble far more the embattled resilience of white evangelicals than the deflated balloon of the white mainline. At the same time, African American Christians are not nearly so easy to categorize as the language of “the black church” would suggest. Black believers fill the pews of Protestant churches, charismatic and Pentecostal churches, evangelical and Baptist churches, and both majority-black and majority-white churches. A small but sturdy percentage is Roman Catholic. In other words, they are well distributed. So while I will not be focusing on race, I here acknowledge that it—not just race but racism—hovers above and within and around the story, sometimes at the edges, more often at the heart of it. 

Protestantism and the Sexual Revolution

The transition from Eisenhower to Kennedy symbolizes, for the American mainline, both a summit and a cliff. The reason is that the 1960s kicked off two epochal trends that continue into the present. The first was the sexual revolution.

It could be argued that, in the last seventy-five years, every major public debate in the American church, including every occasion for schism or division, has been about sex. Divorce and remarriage, artificial contraception, births out of wedlock, working mothers, single parenting, the Pill, abortion, the ordination of women, sex outside marriage, same-sex marriage, gender identity and biological sex—these, and not arguments about Jesus or justification by faith, have dominated Christian discourse. (Race, again, is the only other contender, whether in the 1970s or the 2020s. This, too, is a social and not a doctrinal issue.)

With respect to sex, the mainline bet on the wrong horse. It allied itself to the liberalism of the political, educational, and cultural elites and this, it turned out, was not what most American Christians were looking for—even when they agreed on the politics. Mainline Protestantism had always been respectable, and since political and sexual liberalism was supposed to be not just the spirit of the present age but the vanguard of the future, then liberalism as such needed to be embraced and proclaimed from within the Church, from her pulpits and prayers and pamphlets. This liberalism was all-encompassing: it was moral, it was political, it was activist, and ultimately it was theological, too. It called into question the trustworthiness of Scripture, the classical metaphysics of the creeds, the traditional morality of the catechisms, and much more besides.

Defection and loss weren’t instantaneous, but once the ball got rolling it only sped up as the years went by. Two phenomena are worth noting. On one hand, ordinary people in the pews needed a reason to come to church. But if the mainline was merely the DNC at prayer while crossing its fingers even during prayer, then why go? Why not sleep in, drift away, or maybe join that young, vibrant, energetic start-up around the corner? Sure, they might be a little conservative, but they’re on to something. There’s life there. And there’s no doubt that they believe—evangelicals aren’t known for crossing fingers.

On the other hand, mainline leaders living in the postwar boom failed to realize how much they depended on the social and religious capital built up from prior centuries. They fervently believed in the separation of church and state, but they operated as the clerisy of an unofficially established church. They cared about helping the poor, but their education and values (not to mention the source of their prestige and a good portion of their rolls) were substantially upper-class. They hated war and segregation, but their WASP credentials alienated them from the working class, both white and black, and their fence-sitting on Vietnam marked them as insufficiently radical for the left and insufficiently patriotic for the right. While their younger members protested, their older members began to trickle out the door.

In a word, mainline leadership took for granted that the world they’d always known and led would somehow remain in place even as they helped to birth a new world to replace it. But in midwifing a novus ordo seclorum into being, they rendered themselves redundant. Once you’ve placed a question mark next to traditional beliefs, traditional morals, and traditional texts, what else is left? Absent these, there is no reason to join a religious tradition except for community and social capital. But those are byproducts of membership; as the sole motivation for observance or attendance, they are far too weak to sustain belonging, especially when peer pressure has relaxed.

It is a tautology to say that religion becomes optional when it is no longer compulsory. Compulsoriness, however, is said many ways. For many people church was felt to be compulsory, even if, strictly speaking, it was not. And once the feeling was gone for mainline Protestants, they started heading for the exits.

Losing Our Religion

This trend, namely, Americans leaving religion altogether, leads to another I want to highlight: secularization. Like “evangelical,” this is a charged term with dozens of possible meanings. For my purposes I will rely on a sociological definition offered by Phil Zuckerman, Isabella Kasselstrand, and Ryan T. Cragun. In their book Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society, they argue that secularization includes:

1) the process of religion losing its overarching, hegemonic significance as a result of its being increasingly differentiated and sequestered from other institutional sectors of society and 2) the concomitant processes whereby religiosity weakens, lessens, diminishes, or fades in society. At the micro level, secularization is best understood, articulated, and measured in relation to the three Bs. That is, secularization entails a social process in which fewer people, over time, believe in supernatural claims, fewer people engage in religious behaviors, and fewer people belong to or identify with a religion.

The authors go on to argue that, as societies develop economically and/or adopt liberal political structures, they always secularize. This, they say, is demonstrably true and brooks no significant exceptions. The end result “is not widespread irreligion,” meaning mass atheism or opposition to religion, “but rather widespread religious indifference.” Such indifference is not mutually exclusive with plenty of people believing, behaving, and belonging in religious ways and in religious communities. But the civic bonds of social obligation have seriously deteriorated; the ambient culture no longer makes faith a given of common life.

The process of secularization came earlier for Europe, and for a time it seemed America would hold out. It proved only to be a delay. Members of every generation since the Boomers are less likely to be regular attenders of religious services of any kind, less likely to be regular attenders of a Christian church, and less likely to claim to be Christians. Three terms have been proposed to describe these Americans: “None,” “Nothing in Particular,” and “Nonvert.” The first takes its name from those who check none of the above on a survey of religious options, but for this reason it includes atheists and agnostics. The second group picks out those Nones who are neither atheist/agnostic nor a member of a determinate religious body. The third, coined by Stephen Bullivant, refers to members of either the first or the second group who were raised in a religiously observant household but, at some point in teen years or adulthood, left the faith and did not join another.

Regarding this last group, a book published in 2023 called The Great Dechurching offers some important insight. With the help of research done by Ryan Burge and Paul Djupe, pastors Jim Davis and Michael Graham found that forty million living American adults no longer attend church, though they once did, and that “most of this dechurching has happened in the past twenty-five years.” That’s 15 percent of the population. If true, it amounts to a kind of negative Third Great Awakening, and quite possibly the greatest single-generation religious shift in American history.

Whether we call these people Nones, Nonverts, or Dechurched, they are a growing, if curious, bunch. Most of them still believe in the divine and many still pray or occasionally attend religious services. If you count them as one American religious group among others, comparing them not to Christianity in general but to Hindus and Muslims, Catholics and Baptists, they are likely to be the largest such group in the next decade. In his new book The American Religious Landscape, Burge even argues that, among all Americans, “it’s probable that nothing in particulars will be the plurality choice . . . in the next fifteen or twenty years.”

This, in brief, is the secular future and present for American society: at once religious and irreligious, Christian and post-Christian, spiritual but not institutional, culturally Protestant but syncretistic, entrepreneurial, and individualistic in practice. Nathan Hatch calls this “the democratization of American Christianity.” Ross Douthat’s term is “bad religion.” Americans don’t give up on prayer or the supernatural, they just opt for heresies old and new, riffing on received religion with peculiarly American twists. Tara Burton calls it “remixed religion,” a do-it-yourself approach that fuses crystals and seances with sacraments and rosaries. It’s odd only if you assume the truth is found nowhere except in one of the major global institutional expressions of faith. And that’s just begging the question. 

Who Will Replace the Mainline?

I said I’d lift up four themes, and so far I’ve mentioned two: the sexual revolution and secularization. The other two are simply other Christian traditions: evangelicalism and Catholicism. These, in a sort of pincer movement, quietly advanced on the mainline’s position and, when the opportune moment arrived, attacked it from both sides. It didn’t happen all at once; rather, it resulted from decades of quiet incremental expansion.

We have already seen what has long attracted so many Americans to evangelicalism: the frontier spirit, the can-do attitude, the charismatic vision, the muscular ambition, the cultural adaptability, the missionary zeal, the affective dimension, the leveling spirit. Youth, vitality, growth, expansion—these have always marked American evangelicalism even and especially when besieged by challenges, whether from without or from within. You can see this today in the only growing Christian group in America: so-called “nondenominational” churches. It is unclear whether this growth comes from converts to the faith or “transfers” from other Christian traditions. At any rate it is one more example of the old frontier flexibility applied to a newly competitive marketplace, innovating to attract newcomers inside the doors.

This is the essence of evangelicalism, because evangelicalism is the American genius applied to Christian religion. Evangelicals’ every virtue and every vice have their roots in the American character. The two are intertwined. Evangelicals believe in the Gospel, but they also believe in America. Even the most jaded among them retain some hope in the latter; the despair of some evangelicals in the last decade is best explained by a loss of faith, not in God, but in the country.

To be clear, secularization comes for all, and just as it made inroads on the mainline in the 1960s and ’70s, so it did the same with evangelicals in the last three decades. Perhaps they failed to learn the lesson of Protestant liberals and wedded themselves to a narrow politics, only this time on the right instead of the left. Perhaps their moral and other failures exhausted the patience of parishioners. Perhaps evangelicals, too, were drawing down on capital they’d not created themselves, capital they furthermore lacked the institutional strength to replenish. In any case, evangelicals we will always have with us, but in the coming years they will endure in diminished numbers.

That leaves Catholics. With around sixty-two million Americans on the rolls, Catholicism is by far the largest religious tradition in the country. No other Protestant group comes close. The primary reasons are immigration and, until recently, large families. The truth, however, is that American Catholicism cannot keep its children in the faith, and both Nones and evangelicals are the beneficiaries. Even today its numbers appear superficially steady by comparison to others’ decline solely because of the steady stream of Catholic immigrants across the border. There is a distinct possibility, then, that Catholic support of strict immigration and deportation policies could end up weakening Catholics’ dominant presence in America.

For a moment it seemed that Catholics might seize the leadership vacuum left open by the collapse—the detonation, the evacuation, the suicide—of mainline Protestantism. Just as neoconservatives were anti-Communist liberals who moved right during the Cold War, so erstwhile liberal Protestants found themselves politically homeless, even betrayed, in the 1970s. For a Lutheran like Robert Jenson, who marched on Washington in 1963 and protested the war in Vietnam, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade changed everything. From Jenson’s perspective, the moral and political through-line from racial segregation through bombing villages to abortion on demand was self-evident. He learned quickly that the connections were not nearly so clear to those he marched with. For this reason his fellow Lutheran, Richard John Neuhaus, left Protestantism and was received into the Catholic Church.

Neuhaus, Jenson, and their many friends and fellow travelers hoped the mainline could be replaced, if not by Catholics per se then by an ecumenical alliance led by conservative Catholic clergy and intellectuals. It was not to be. They had success in elite spheres like academia and Washington, D.C. They advised presidents, launched think tanks and magazines, filled seats on courts at every level. But even if America wasn’t so culturally Protestant as to recoil at a new Catholic mainline—and I think it was and ever will be—the one-two punch of the sex abuse crisis and the George W. Bush presidency put that notion to rest for good. The American bishops are still recovering from their loss of moral leadership. And with reason.

Not that Catholics are going anywhere. Their sheer numbers, plus the continuation of immigration in some form from countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America with large Catholic populations, plus their disproportionate presence in elite cultural, legal, and political institutions ensure a Catholic future even in secular America.

In a way, you might reduce the complexity of that religious future (which, I risk repeating, is the present) by reference to four groups: Catholics, evangelicals, cultural Protestants, and other. “Other” would encompass actual mainline Protestants, Eastern Orthodox Christians, and all non-Christian religious traditions as well as vehemently anti-Christian groups. “Cultural Protestants” would describe Christian-friendly atheists and agnostics, adherents of American civil religion, citizens who don’t go to church but pray in the name of Jesus, and ex-Christians of various stripes—i.e., all people who wear the mantle of high-Protestant civilization and its mores, which is to say, the worldview minus the metaphysics.

And this returns us to where we began: namely, with the vast middle of American Christianity utterly hollowed out. Mainline believers who remained in the faith were either hoovered “up” into catholic traditions or pulled “down” into evangelical fellowships. To be sure, there remain some true-believing via media Protestants who are morally and theologically conservative and continue to attempt to strike the balance between high and low. These are members, for example, of the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA), the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS), the newly formed Global Methodist Church (GMC), and offshoots of Episcopalianism like the Reformed Episcopal Church (REC), Anglican Church of North America (ACNA), and Anglican Mission in the Americas (AMiA). Outside of the Methodists, whose departure from the larger, more liberal United Methodist Church (UMC)—over, yes, sexual ethics—is still ongoing, each of these groups is a fraction of a fraction of the American population. Whatever their future, they will not be resuming their place at the commanding heights of the culture.

More to the point, even these traditions contain more than a little evangelical DNA. What “converts” they make are often already Christians who are looking for a more liturgically reverent, more intellectually sophisticated, more historically rooted Protestantism. These believers, sometimes ex-Catholics but usually ex-vangelicals, bring the American religious genius with them through the doors. In many cases it’s only a matter of time before the leveling impulse wends its way through the parish. Soon it will be evangelical in all but name. This is fitting, since the churches in America have for some time been Protestant in name only.

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