Can Mainline Protestantism Be Rebuilt?

Aaron Renn, Aquila Report, 4/23

Jake Meador wrote a recent interesting piece on a topic of great interest to me, namely about a call to attempt to create a new Protestant mainline. He says:

So to bring the discussion to reformed catholicity and what reformed catholic churches can do in our current context, here it is: The old Mainline is dead. American Catholicism is likely terminal as well, even prior to the plausible turmoil to come under Pope Francis’s successor. American Evangelicalism is now encountering its own dechurching crisis and loss of influence. The Christian movement in America is thus at a crossroads. Something new will need to be built. But I do not think we should build a new evangelicalism; I think we should build a new mainline.

That mainline should be centered around the EPC, PCA, and ACNA with room for the possible addition of Lutheran, Methodist, or Baptist denominations, should denominations interested in this project emerge from those streams. The old mainline encompassed Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, Lutherans, and Baptists. We currently have Presbyterian and Anglican communions that might plausibly grow into the “continuing church” vision once articulated at the PCA’s founding. It remains to be seen if the Global Methodists can join this movement, let alone if the LCMS can stave off its own demographic collapse or if a strengthened Baptist commujnion can emerge from the chaos and corruption currently vexing the SBC. These are the institutional pieces to watch, then: the PCA, EPC, ACNA, Global Methodists, LCMS, maybe WELS, and SBC.

I agree that America lost a lot with the decline of the mainline denominations. Attempts to at least salvage or reclaim some of that is of great interest to me, and also others as well. I think you can see Tim Keller’s plan for the renewal of the American church through this lens, and I might be collaborating on an article about that in the future.

Lind’s Four American Republics

Before digging in, however, I thought it was interesting to see Meador lay out a “four Americas” framework from Michael Lind that was very similar to my own version. I did not draw from Lind, though had heard he had something like this. But I think this sort of division of American history is one very obvious way to do it, so I’m sure it has recurred many times.

Where I differ from the framework Meador gives is that I see the “fourth republic” or “America 4.0” as less emerged than he does (or at least that’s my impression). I see us as in a liminal period where we can’t yet see the contours of what the future system will look like, just as those in the Depression didn’t know what postwar America would be like. The old is passing away but the new has not yet been born. Hence we should be cautious about over fitting solutions to the present movement.

Through Catholic Eyes

Meador is also influenced by Joseph Bottum’s An Anxious Age, which I actually read after I saw him make a previous reference to it. It’s an interesting book in which Bottum makes the common argument that contemporary elite morality and culture is a form of secularized mainline Protestantism (a view with some degree of truth). In his telling, Catholics (with evangelicals in a supporting role as public mouthpiece for Catholic natural law arguments) were the would be replacement for the mainline role in society, but that project failed because America ended up being too Protestant to submit to a Catholicism that was weakened at the time by internal issues.

You won’t be surprised to hear that Bottum himself is a staunch Catholic. That is, like 90% of the people I read who center America’s problems in mainline Protestantism, he himself is not a Protestant. Invariably in these readings, any role Ellis Islanders (like my family) might have played in contemporary America’s failings is minimized or avoided altogether. Just once I’d like to see a Catholic writer say something like, “The WASPs handed over the keys, but we ran the car into a ditch.”

This is one reason I have been arguing that Protestants must stop outsourcing their thinking to Catholic intellectuals. Invariably this leads to us repeating essentially Catholic serving talking points, as Bottum himself basically says in his book (e.g., of George W. Bush).

Meador’s Mainline Restoration Project

With those preliminaries, what does Meador’s mainline restoration project look like?

Institutionally, he sees it centered in the conservative “shadow denominations” of the mainline, mostly splinter groups (EPC, PCA) but some which are not (LCMS). He goes on to say:

Sociologically and theologically speaking, the new Mainline needs to be a missional center-right movement. By “center-right” I mean robustly committed to the biblical witness on sex and gender (here the PCA sexuality report and ACNA’s pastoral statement should be treated as a kind of consensus position of the new mainline), deep in the catholic tradition (and therefore slow to embrace new ideas and intellectual trends and always testing everything by its fidelity first to Scripture and second to catholic tradition), and defined by a kind of dispositional conservatism that favors slowness, custom, and traditional Christian habits and practices.

By “missional”, I mean “committed to pursuing missionary encounters with our non-Christian neighbors,” which will require actually living amongst our neighbors and being conversant enough in their ways of thinking and living that we can be genuinely present in their lives and speak sensibly to their particular questions and struggles.

Ultimately, we are seeking on a political level to build back to being the third leg of the stool, in Bottum’s illustration.

On a church level, I think reformational catholic congregations need to be thinking about very practical ways of cultivating a thick common life that will address the individual spiritual crisis of our moment centered around loneliness, anxiety, depression, and despair.

He sees the church accomplishing the last part by “re-parenting the lost,” “overcoming distance” (such as by having church member live near each other), and “overcoming distraction” (such as by limiting technology in our communities).

He concludes by writing:

I think the core idea running through it is something like this: We live in a society that has mostly forgotten what people are. And this has enormous ramifications on our politics and common life, but also on the individual experiences of the people coming into our churches every week. If we are to have a missionary encounter with such a world, then often I think it will begin by simply reminding humans what it means to be human by modeling normal, healthy, sane human life together in our communities. This needn’t mean anything fancy or grandiose; I am mostly thinking of sharing meals together, forgiving and being forgiven, speaking candidly about our desires and weaknesses, and making ourselves available to one another as needed.

Read More

https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/rebuilding-mainline-protestantism