How Should Evangelicals Respond to the Vanishing Mainline?

Ryan P. Burge. The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations Is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us. Brazos Press, 2026. $26.99. 232 pp.

The title of Ryan P. Burge’s new book The Vanishing Church might suggest that this is just another statistics-laden chronicle of the recent decline of American religion, of the sort that Christian Smith described in his recent book Why Religion Went Obsolete. But in fact, Burge’s book is about something much more intriguing—the decline not of Christianity in general but of a particular type of Christianity: mainline Protestantism.

Burge, a political science professor who is probably the leading analyst of religion data in the United States today, points out that not all branches of American Christianity are declining. The percentage of Americans who identify as evangelical is just as high as it was fifty years ago, during the 1970s. Whatever else may be happening to religion, the evangelical church is not vanishing. And the percentage of Americans who identify as Catholic has dropped only slightly (from 26 to 22 percent) during the past fifty years.

But at the same time, the percentage of Americans who say they have no religion has increased by nearly six times (from 5 percent to nearly 30 percent). And among Gen-Z adults (those born in the late 1990s or early 2000s), nearly half identify as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular.” There are now more nones than either Catholics or Protestants in the United States.

If the percentage of Americans who identify as evangelical or Catholic is holding steady, where are the “nones” coming from? The data seems to provide a clear answer: The growth of the “nones” has come almost entirely at the expense of mainline Protestantism. In the mid-1970s, 31 percent of Americans were mainline Protestant, and in the 1950s, perhaps as many as 50 percent were. But today, only 9 percent of Americans identify as mainline Protestant, and that figure is likely to drop even further in the next few years, as older mainline Protestant church members pass away. With only 2 percent of Americans age 18-40 identifying with a mainline Protestant denomination, the future of mainline Protestantism looks bleak.

In short, with evangelicalism and other forms of conservative Christianity holding steady and with nones on the rise, America is becoming more religiously polarized. Burge’s data provide statistical confirmation of what Tim Keller presciently observed eighteen years ago. “Skepticism, fear, and anger toward traditional religion are growing in power and influence,” he wrote in 2008 in The Reason for God. “But at the same time, robust, orthodox belief in the traditional faiths is growing as well.”

In Keller’s view, the continued vitality of “robust, orthodox belief” and the decline of a lukewarm, moderate, cultural Christianity was a positive development, but in Burge’s view, the loss of the moderate mainline is cause for lament. Regardless of what one might think about mainline Protestantism’s theology, its demise will have catastrophic effects for American politics and society, he suggests.

For decades, mainline Protestants controlled American cultural institutions. Mainline Protestants founded the majority of the nation’s colleges and universities. Most American presidents and Supreme Court justices of the twentieth century were members of mainline Protestant denominations. And mainline Protestants were important intellectual leaders who wrote many of the articles and books that shaped American political and social thought for much of the twentieth century.

In the 1950s, the secretary of state (John Foster Dulles), the founding editor of the nation’s largest news magazines (Henry Luce), and the president of the United States (Dwight D. Eisenhower) were all mainline Presbyterians. So, for that matter, were many elite university presidents, including the president of Princeton University (Harold Dodds), who was the son of a Bible professor at Grove City College (which was a mainline Presbyterian institution at the time).

But today mainline Protestants have only a fraction of the membership numbers or the cultural influence that they once enjoyed. A few mainline Protestant colleges (including Grove City College) have joined evangelicalism; many more (Princeton included) have secularized.

Intellectual historian David Hollinger argued in Christianity’s American Fate (2022) that on a political or social level it may not matter, because liberal Protestants’ ethical causes triumphed in a secularized form even as mainline Protestantism declined. Civil rights became widely accepted, same-sex marriage was legalized, women achieved greater equality in the workplace, and the military draft disappeared, even as the mainline Protestant denominations that had advocated for all of those things continued to decline.

But Burge argues that the decline of mainline Protestantism has hurt American politics far more than Hollinger assumed. Mainline Protestant congregations have generally not been bastions of left-wing thinking, he asserts. Instead, they have been a force for political moderation, where Republicans could worship alongside Democrats. Many mainline Protestant clergy may have leaned toward the political left, but a large contingent of the members were more conservative, thus keeping the typical mainline Protestant congregation from veering too far from the political center. For decades, public opinion polls showed that mainline Protestant voters leaned slightly Republican, but with plenty of Democrats in the midst.

But today, as conservative evangelicalism has replaced the mainline as the dominant expression of Christianity in the United States, American Christianity has lost its political moderating force. The Democratic Party has become much more secular and the Republican Party more evangelical and conservative Catholic—but with no sizable mainline Protestant contingent available to split the difference or moderate the extremes.

Burge believes that when we worship alongside those of different political perspectives, we learn to avoid demonizing the opposing political party, and we begin to understand the merits of the other side’s arguments even if we do not fully agree with them. That’s what once happened in mainline Protestant congregations, he argues—and it’s part of the reason why Republicans and Democrats used to be less extreme and more amenable to friendly conversations with members of the other party.

But political moderation is no longer in vogue, and that may be one reason why Americans haven’t shown much interest in attending mainline Protestant congregations. “By trying to reject the extremes of evangelical Christianity on the one hand while also resisting the pull toward nonreligion on the other, the mainline has found a way to accelerate its own demise,” Burge writes. The result has been disastrous for American democracy. In politics as in religion, Burge notes, “there is no place for moderates.”

Burge writes as an evangelical-turned-mainline-Protestant who laments the decline of his own mainline Protestant denomination. During the time that he was writing this book, the small American Baptist congregation that he was pastoring as a part-time minister dwindled to fewer than ten regular attendees and then closed its doors altogether. Across the country, there are numerous similar stories. “In the American Baptist denomination, very few churches are avoiding rapid decline,” Burge says. What’s true of American Baptist congregations is equally true of Episcopal, Methodist, Disciples of Christ, and United Church of Christ churches; their membership is aging and they have few younger adherents to carry on the torch after the next decade or two. Half of all Episcopalians are over age 65. One-third of the members of the Presbyterian Church (USA) are over 70, while only 4 percent are under 18.

Evangelicals who view the mainline as theologically vacuous may be tempted to greet the decline of mainline Protestant denominations with a bit of schadenfreude, but Burge asks us to remember that the demise of mainline Protestant churches will have a detrimental effect on our communities when the soup kitchens, charities, and other socially beneficial projects that these churches operate also shutter their doors. “When mainline churches close, opportunities to serve the less fortunate and build social capital will largely be lost,” Burge says. And on a national level, the loss of the mainline will deprive us of the political moderating force that has held our democracy together.

On a societal level, I suspect that Burge’s argument is largely correct. Mainline Protestantism has been a stabilizing force in American political and community life, and its demise will leave a hole in our political community that will not be easy to fill.

But rather than merely lament the decline of mainline Protestantism, perhaps evangelical churches can try to fill that gap. As Tim Keller argued in Center Church, gospel-centered churches can love their communities and spearhead initiatives to serve the needy around them, just as mainline Protestant churches historically have. They can even become places for civil political dialogue by welcoming Christians from multiple political perspectives in the same way that mainline Protestant churches have.

There’s no intrinsic theological barrier that should keep evangelical churches from being centers of irenic sanity in the midst of a growing partisan divide in the United States. In fact, the more that evangelical churches preach the superiority of the kingdom of God over all earthly kingdoms, the more they are likely to transcend the nation’s partisan divisions and serve as a refuge from polarizing politics.

Burge is correct to note that evangelical churches have in recent years not been known for political moderation or irenic service to the community. But perhaps as mainline Protestant churches decline, there is now more need than ever for evangelical churches to step into this role—a role that is compatible with their gospel mission.

Evangelicals might be tempted to mobilize en masse in a culture war against secular forces, polarizing the nation along partisan lines. But perhaps in the long run, it would be wiser to instead fill the void left by the vanishing mainline Protestant church and attempt a more irenic approach. Just because Americans are more divided than ever over religion doesn’t mean that they have to be equally polarized over partisan politics.

If we want to avoid further polarization, perhaps we’ll have to set the example of irenic dialogue and civic-minded community service in our own churches. After all, if mainline Protestantism is now a “vanishing church,” more theologically conservative Christians may be the only ones left who can take on this responsibility and save the nation from partisan extremism.