Episcopal Church peaked 1966 w/3.4 mil, now 1.7 mil, 50% loss. Presbyterian Church (USA) peaked 1965 w/4.4 mil, now 1.4 mil, 68% loss. United Church of Christ peaked 1965 w/2.1 mil, now 850,000, 60% loss. Evangelical Lutherans (ELCA) peaked 1968 w/5.9 mil, now 3.5 mil, 41% loss.
— Mark Tooley (@markdtooley) December 11, 2018
Follow the thread for graphs.
Mainline Christianity shares many precepts with neo-marxists, social justice warriors, postmodernists, deconstructionists, and anarcho-radicals but is bounded in by tradition and social norms. Consequently, in my opinion it has often struck a near miraculous balance between social progress without tipping over into the fanaticism of the Social Justice Jacobins.
But tradition and social norms have been weakening, loosing the constraints of the social justice jacobins. From the pulpits where you used to hear educated and erudite sermons of immense sophistication and nuance, you hear more and more sermons which are close to a critical theory dissertation, even dipping into anti-racist racism and similarly hate-fueled positions.
I have wondered over the past couple of decades just how much of the mainline church membership decline was explained by the creeping encroachment of less intelligent postmodernist critical theorists into the clergy and the congregation. I don't think they are unrelated, it is just a matter of degree of causation.
And the irony is that most of the traditionalists are not losing faith, they are simply exiting the old halls and finding it elsewhere in other quarters. Still religious, just not mainline churched.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment