If Ernest Hemingway were to interview American Mainline Protestantism in 2025, the conversation would go something like this: “How did you go spiritually bankrupt?” “Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.”
There seems little doubt that we are now approaching that second, sudden phase. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has this year closed its foreign mission agency. This move is a sign of the denomination’s financial struggles, but it is also the logical outworking of the kind of squeamishness about missionary work that the religious pluralism of the PCUSA engenders.
Additionally, an article by Chris Mondics in the Spectator World’s August edition details how progressivism has hollowed out the institutions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, focusing in particular on its seminaries. Their decline has indeed been sudden. I worked for many years near the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, enjoyed cordial friendships with faculty, and even served as the first external reader in their PhD program. Now that seminary is no more. Mondics served for seven years on the board of its successor, the United Lutheran Seminary. His eye-witness account of the institution is sad but predictable, recounting how it has been dragged into irrelevance by its commitment to the progressive politics of the wider world. While both the PCUSA and the ELCA may be rich in property and endowments, their free-falling membership points to a future of churches empty both of people and of faith.
This sudden bankruptcy has been years in the making. Mainline Protestantism lost interest in the transcendent truths of Christianity and married the spirit of the age generations ago. In the first half of the 20th century, this made it the vehicle of anti-communism and, from the perspective of today, the handmaid of the political right. In the 1960s, with the civil rights movement, it pivoted to the left and has maintained that progressive direction ever since, as displayed on countless church signs throughout the country.
Some years ago, I officiated at a wedding in the local United Methodist church, festooned as it was with rainbow flags. A 5-year-old guest asked me if the church had a particular passion for the story of Noah. Would that it had. That might at least have distinguished it from every other Pride-flag-waving business in the town. Instead, it had chosen not to be a prophetic witness of the faith to the world but to be one more example of capitulation to the virtue signaling demanded by the wider culture. It boasted not in its difference from the world but in its similarity. In seeking relevance, it declared its irrelevance to all and sundry. Why should anyone go to church to hear what can be heard elsewhere? And why should anyone go to seminary simply to learn how to express contemporary political opinions in a religious idiom?
Mondics’s analysis does fall short in one area. In his view, the core problem in the ELCA is the disconnection between pulpit and pew, with a leadership detached from, even in many cases contemptuous of, the concerns of the people who put their tithes into the plate every Sunday. This is no doubt true. The political polarization of America and the detachment of the officer class from the rest has significance for the Church as much as it does for the ballot box. And why should anyone attend church only to hear the pastor thank God every week that he is not like other men — like “those people” who voted for Trump?
The problem, however, would not be solved if the pulpiteers were more sensitive to the political tastes of the congregants. As a principle, pandering to the pew is no better than pandering to the outside world. A return to the pre-1960s mainline church alliance with the political right is unlikely, but it would also simply change the idiom of the underlying problem. Same horse, different jockey, as a former colleague used to say.
The ELCA’s real problem is its failure to grasp the church’s vision and mission. That vision must focus on the church’s countercultural, supernatural message of redemption through the life, death, and resurrection of the incarnate Christ. That is not simply an inspiring or instructive story, analogous to one of Aesop’s fables. It is not merely a useful idiom for expressing worldly political ambitions. It is a statement about ultimate, eternal reality, in the light of which all lesser, temporal realities are to be judged.
Commenting on the PCUSA’s decision to close its foreign mission agency, Danny Olinger, editor of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church’s magazine (New Horizons), defines the church’s mission as follows:
The church is to be witness of the salvation found in Jesus … The church’s task is not about co-operating with other non-Christian faith traditions found around the world. The Church’s task is not to provide an alternative American political presence. The commission that Jesus gives to His Church is to go into the world and to make disciples of every nation, baptizing in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching all that Jesus commanded (Matt. 28:19–20).
That Olinger writes this to an orthodox, not mainline, denomination is noteworthy. Mainline Protestantism lost that understanding of the Church’s mission decades ago. Its bankruptcy, once slow, is now about to be very sudden. But in such times as these, when the political stakes seem to be so high and the rhetoric of public discourse is so extreme, there is a real temptation to lose sight of that mission. There is a lesson here for all churches, no matter how orthodox on paper.
Originally published at First Things.
Carl R. Trueman is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College. He is an esteemed church historian and previously served as the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and Public Life at Princeton University. Trueman has authored or edited more than a dozen books, including The Rise and Triumpth of the Modern Self, The Creedal Imperative, Luther on the Christian Life, and Histories and Fallacies.
