Abstract
Total membership in mainline Protestant denominations has been declining for half a century. Sharp decreases in the late 1960s and early 1970s were followed by more modest losses for the next 25 years, with sharper declines returning at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Analysis of denominational data on the components of change reveals two major factors linked to the most recent drop: departures of schismatic congregations in five denominations that have liberalized gay- and lesbian-related policies, and fewer individuals joining mainline denominations. Furthermore, child baptism rates are dropping and, in at least one denomination, the ratio of child professions of faith to child baptisms a decade earlier has fallen faster than membership over the past 13 years. These findings are largely consistent with previous research using national survey data that shows low fertility in the mainline, a drop in transfers into the mainline from more conservative churches, and general increases in the percent of the U.S. population with no religious affiliation. Together, the evidence strongly suggests continued mainline membership losses for the indeterminate future.
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Notes
For convenience, I use the current name or its abbreviation when I present data over time, even though at an earlier period the current body may have had a different name or didn’t exist as such but was preceded by two or more denominations that later merged.
Denominational data are not without their shortcomings, primary among them non-reporting by congregations.
Much of the data was collect by the denominations themselves, and made available either through electronic data files or printed documents such as annual yearbooks. Some data came from a compilation by the National Council of Churches as provided on the website of the Association of Religion Data Archives (http://thearda.com/denoms/families/groups.asp; accessed March 2, 2017). ARDA also provided a data file of RCA statistics prior to 2000, which was compiled by Donald Luidens and Roger Nemeth (http://www.thearda.com/Archive/Files/Descriptions/RCAHIST.asp; accessed April 5, 2016).
The word “gross” is used here to distinguish these values from net change (net change equals gross gains minus gross losses).
The exodus of congregations generally began or accelerated around the time each denomination changed its policy to permit the ordination of sexually active gays and lesbians to ministry, though the divisions leading to schism have their origins in liberal-conservative theological differences that predate the emergence of homosexuality as a point of contention. See, for example, Hoge (1976). It is interesting that the departures of congregations from the PC(USA) show an uptick beginning four years before the denominational action opening the ministry to sexually active gays and lesbians.
Reaffirmations are combined with professions of faith because some denominations do not collect these data separately.
One possible reason Hoge et al. (1994) failed to find among their former PC(USA) confirmands anyone who had switched out of the PC(USA) because of actions of the national church: they did not sample confirmands from congregations that had left the denomination (or one of its two predecessor denominations) in the preceding 15–20 years, and in doing so overlooked a major source of theologically driven transfers out.
Due, it should be noted, to fewer conservatives Protestants switching to the mainline, not to more mainline Protestants switching to more conservative groups (Hout et al. 2001).
A complicating factor in any comparison of national survey data with denominational statistics is the phenomenon of “mental members”: people who claim a religious affiliation but who are not on the membership rolls of any church (Hadaway 1990; Marcum 1990). One explanation for the increase in the percentage of Americans who have no religious affiliation may be a drop in mental affiliates rather than a true increase in the percentage with no religious affiliation. To the extent mental affiliates have declined in numbers, the growth in Americans with no religious affiliation in the 1990s may simply be delayed evidence of the increase in mainline dropouts in the 1970s and 1980s.
As a rule, American Baptists and Disciples do not baptize infants or very young children. Data for the PC(USA) and RCA are used exclusively in this analysis because they have the longest time series of child baptisms of the other mainline groups.
The proxy is imperfect: Not all child baptisms are of infants or very young children. In the PC(USA) the category includes all baptisms of persons aged 17 or younger. Survey data on a representative sample of Presbyterian members found that of those raised in a Presbyterian congregation 70% were baptized at age two or younger, and another 8% were baptized prior to their eight birthday (Research Services 2011a).
The white birth rate is used instead of the overall U.S. birth rate because both the RCA and PC(USA) are overwhelmingly white, non-Hispanic, and have been so historically. PC(USA) records show that the membership was 91.6% white, non-Hispanic at the end of 2014 (Research Services 2015). Decades earlier, an independent study reported the combined membership of the three largest Presbyterian denominations as around 0.6% black (Loescher 1947). While the RCA does not report its racial-ethnic composition, its membership is likely largely white, given its heritage as a church of Dutch immigrants.
My own observation suggests one possible hypothesis, the “grandparent effect.” People who are active in church but whose adult children are not—an increasingly common occurrence, given cohort patterns of church involvement (Putnam and Campbell 2010), may arrange for their grandchildren to be baptized in their (the grandparents’) church, knowing that the grandchildren would otherwise remain unbaptized.
Note that these are aggregated data; it is impossible to track individuals from baptism through to confirmation.
Between 2000 and 2010, the PC(USA) created only 226 new congregations (Research Services 2011b).
Consider the Presbyterian Church in America, which formed in 1972 from congregations that had left the Presbyterian Church in the United States—one of the predecessor denominations of the PC(USA)—largely over the issue of ordaining women to the ministry. The PCA and PC(USA) have no formal contacts or cooperation with each other, and for all intents and purposes the split seems permanent.
A May, 2016 Gallup Poll found that 37% of Americans opposed same-sex marriage, a year after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized the practice nationwide (Gallup Organization 2016).
At a rate of decline of −0.015%, the mainline would have 3.7 million members in 2115—a fraction of that today, to be sure, but not extinct.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the following representatives of mainline denominations for their help in providing data used in this presentation: Gerianne Blier and Jeff Woods, American Baptist Churches USA; Kirk Hadaway, Episcopal Church; Daniel Taylor, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America; Deborah Coe, Joelle Kopacz, and Ida Smith-Williams, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.); Nate Roosien, Reformed Church in America; Destiny Hisey and Kristina Lizardy-Hajbi, United Church of Christ; Lauren Ariens and Whitney Washington, United Methodist Church.
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This article is a revision of the 2016 presidential address to the annual meeting of the Religious Research Association, Atlanta, Georgia, October 28, 2016.
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Marcum, J.P. W(h)ither the Mainline? Trends and Prospects. Rev Relig Res 59, 119–134 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-017-0288-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-017-0288-3