The Death of the Mainline (and Why It Matters)

I just returned from a week at Lake Okoboji in northwest Iowa, where, since my birth, I have gathered with my extended family for an old-fashioned evangelical Bible conference every August.  This sort of gathering used to be found all over the place, but it's a dying breed.  The Okoboji Conference (founded by my great-grandfather in 1935) is still vibrant, attracting roughly 2000 people each year for morning classes and evening services.  This year I co-taught a class with my brother Phil, titled Christ and Culture: Christian Perspectives on Law, Entertainment, and Business.  While my brother handled the entertainment and business sides, I spent three days exploring modern law with 160 evangelicals.  It was challenging for me, and undoubtedly jolting for them, in part because I encouraged them to look beyond scriptural texts to find intellectual resources for engaging our culture on issues like human dignity, the family, and economic justice.  (At a minimum, I guarantee that there is a deeper working knowledge of "subsidiarity" today among northwest Iowa's evangelicals than at any time in history.)

So engagement between Catholics and evangelicals is on my mind, and that might explain why I found Joseph Bottum's The Death of Protestant America so interesting.  Bottum places Mainline Protestantism's decline in a broader cultural context, focusing on Mainline denominations' abandonment of any serious theological work and capitulation to secular trends.  An excerpt:

[T]he denominations were often engaged in what later generations would scorn as narrow sectarian debates: infant baptism, the consequences of the Fall, the saving significance of good works, the real presence of the Eucharist, the role of bishops. And yet, somehow, the more their concerns were narrow, the more their effects were broad. Perhaps precisely because they were aimed inward, the Protestant churches were able to radiate outward, giving a characteristic shape to the nation: the centrality of families, the pattern of marriages and funerals, the vague but widespread patriotism, the strong localism, and the ongoing sense of some providential purpose at work in the existence of the United States.

Which makes it all the stranger that, somewhere around 1975, the main stream of Protestantism ran dry. In truth, there are still plenty of Methodists around. Baptists and Presbyterians, too—Lutherans, Episcopalians, and all the rest; millions of believing Christians who remain serious and devout. For that matter, you can still find, ­soldiering on, some of the institutions they established in their Mainline glory days: the National Council of Churches, for instance, in its God Box up on New York City’s Riverside Drive, with the cornerstone laid, in a grand ceremony, by President Eisenhower in 1958. But those institutions are corpses, even if they don’t quite realize that they’re dead. The great confluence of Protestantism has dwindled to a trickle over the past thirty years, and the Great Church of America has come to an end.

And that leaves us in an odd situation, unlike any before. The death of the Mainline is the central historical fact of our time: the event that distinguishes the past several decades from every other ­period in American history. Almost every one of our current political and cultural oddities, our contradictions and obscurities, derives from this fact: The Mainline has lost the capacity to set, or even significantly influence, the national vocabulary or the national self-understanding.

Can Catholics and/or evangelicals fill the void?  Bottum has his doubts:

The evangelicals may have too little church organization, and the Catholics may have too much. Besides, both are minorities in the nation’s population, and they arrive at our current moment with a history of being outsiders—the objects of a long record of American suspicion, which hasn’t gone away despite the decline of the churches that gave the suspicion its modern form.

Perhaps some joining of Catholics and evangelicals, in morals and manners, could achieve the social unity in theological difference that characterized the old Mainline. But the vast intellectual resources of Catholicism still sound a little odd in the American ear, just as the enormous reservoir of evangelical faith has been unable, thus far, to provide a widely accepted moral rhetoric.