Mainline decline: Understanding membership drop

Lutheran, The, Apr 2006 by Inskeep, Kenneth

Mainline denominations matter. America needs them. Our country is polarized: Conservative religious groups are synonymous with political conservatism, while more liberal groups seem out-of-touch. But mainline denominations-if they hold true to their heritage-provide a place where all kinds of people can live together and learn from each other as Christians.

Black and white, rich and poor, biblical literalists and modernists, political conservatives and liberals - all come together in one body to worship each week. This is critical to the well-being of society. It's time that mainline denominations celebrate this gift.

Instead there is worry about declining numbers. We are well aware of the numbers. Conservative religious groups including the Southern Baptists, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Assemblies of God have grown dramatically since 1940 (see chart, page 13). At the same time, mainline denominations, including the United Methodists, the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church and the ELCA, all have declined in membership.

But these trends need to be put in a broader context. Perhaps the figures aren't quite so bad, comparatively. And maybe shifts in the fortunes of mainline and conservative religious groups are due to factors that have very little to do with being liberal or conservative.

What about the numbers?

Mainline denominations grew through the 1940s and 1950s, but about 1965 they began to lose members. The latest research suggests those losses have little to do with political orientations or internal disputes about doctrine or church policy.

Instead it's quite clear that the baby boom simply came to an end. And as the boomers became teenagers and adults, they felt free to leave the church. They didn't join conservative churches. They quit going to any church.

Certainly mainline churches should have done more to hold on to their young people, but it wasn't just their responsibility. What role did their parents play? Baptists and members of the Assemblies of God and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, on the other hand, continued to have babies. And they continued to be considerably more successful at keeping their young people in church.

Mark Chaves, a sociologist of religion at the University of Arizona, Tucson, is clear about what happened. He writes in Congregations in America (Harvard University Press, 2004):

"It is well known that evangelical or conservative Protestant denominations have grown in recent decades while mainline and more liberal denominations have declined. ... This shift is often attributed to people fleeing liberal denominations for the supposedly warmer confines of evangelical churches, but recent research shows that perhaps as much as 80 percent of this shift is produced by differential fertility rather than by religious switching. In every birth cohort for which we have the relevant data, women affiliated with conservative Protestant denominations have more children than women affiliated with liberal Protestant denominations.

"Religious switching is relevant to the different fortunes of evangelical and liberal Protestants, but not in a way many people think. The most important trend in religious switching is that conservative denominations are losing fewer people to moderate and liberal denominations than in previous decades, perhaps because upward social mobility no longer prompts switching from being, say, Baptist, to being Presbyterian or Episcopalian.

"In sum, conservative Protestant denominations have indeed been doing better than moderate and liberal denominations, but not because many people have switched from one to the other. The main dynamic is demographic, and there also is evidence that evangelicals are slowly losing their demographic edge. Evangelical birthrates, though higher than liberal birthrates, are declining, as is the fertility gap. Moreover, the rate at which evangelicals lose people to secularity and to religions other than Protestantism, though still lower than for moderate and liberal Protestants, is increasing."

A few religious groups are keeping pace with the population growth. The Latter-day Saints have grown faster than the population over the last two decades. Among the Protestants, the Assemblies of God grew by 104.9 percent between 1980 and 1990. more than 10 times the 9.8 percent increase of the U.S. population. But the Assemblies couldn't sustain that rate of growth. While still impressive, the Assemblies of God grew by 18.2 percent between 1990 and 2000. The Southern Baptists, the nation's largest Protestant body, grew by 9 percent between 1980 and 1990; between 1990 and 2000. the growth rate fell to 6.1 percent, less than half the 13.1 percent growth rate of the population.

The truth is, America has become a more secular place than the religious right would have us believe, at least if church attendance is any indication.

Based on self-reports between 1972 and 1982. an average of 17.4 percent of the population said they "never" attend church or attend "less than once a year." The percent of nonattenders climbed to 25.2 percent in 1993 and then dropped slightly to 23.9 percent in 2004. But at the other end of the spectrum, an average of 37.7 percent said they attended "about weekly," "weekly" or "several times a week" between 1972 and 1982 compared to 32.8 percent in 2004.