The Greatly Exaggerated Death of Protestantism

Brad East’s First Things article “Goldilocks Protestantism,” which has generated a lot of conversation since its publication earlier this spring, begins with a shocking statement: “Imagine a world without Protestantism.” 

East, an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University, quickly clarifies that he doesn’t mean a world without any sort of Protestantism – he just means a world in which the only Christians will be small-c “catholics” (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Anglican) or evangelicals, with “nothing in between.” That world, he says, is “a world without Protestantism—for the religion of the magisterial Reformers in the sixteenth century did not desire, commend, or practice either of these options. Theirs was a via media.” And, perhaps most shocking of all, he claims that we have already arrived as at a “world without Protestantism,” because in many places (including his own town), it’s nearly impossible to find a church that adheres to the “via media” of the sixteenth-century magisterial Reformers (Luther and Calvin, especially) while avoiding both evangelicalism and liberalism. 

(East’s claim that Anglicanism is “small-c catholic” rather than historically Protestant is contestable, of course. From the sixteenth century to the present, most Anglicans have seen themselves as Protestants, and Anglicanism has always included the practices that East identifies as distinctive features of magisterial Protestantism. However, my goal here is not to rebut East’s definitions, but simply to place confessional Protestantism into proper historical context, which will reframe how we read East’s claims.)

The Reformers “baptized babies, recited the Creed, ordained pastors to the service of word and sacrament, practiced baptism and communion as sacraments (not as symbols), and insisted on the validity of the early councils” – so to qualify as a magisterial Protestant church in line with the center of the sixteenth-century Reformation, a congregation must presumably engage in all of these practices while also avoiding liberal Protestant theology. And that, he says, is a standard that few churches meet today – and even fewer will in the future. 

“I live in west Texas, in a blood-red county with a church on every corner,” East writes. “If you asked me to find a bona fide representative of magisterial Protestantism on a given Sunday morning, I wouldn’t have a clue where to start. Mine is a landscape without Protestantism: You can go high and you can go low—most people in my town go low—but you will struggle to find a single congregation in line with the Reformation vision. The few that perhaps remain are either liberal or in hospice care.”

Furthermore, what has happened in west Texas is a microcosm of a global trend. Using the numbers provided by a 2011 Pew Research report on global Christianity, East notes that more than 50 percent of the world’s Christians are Catholic, another 12 percent are Orthodox, and an additional 13 percent are Pentecostals. Baptists comprise just over 3 percent. Only 3.5 percent are Lutheran, and only 2.5 percent are Reformed (a category that includes Presbyterians, along with all other Reformed confessional denominations). If we assume that a substantial number or these Lutheran and Reformed churches are now so liberal that they in practice deny the creeds even if they still recite them in worship, that may mean that fewer than 5 percent of the world’s Christians are still holding onto the vision of the sixteenth-century Reformers. 

“In short, the original Protestant vision, articulated and enacted by the first generations of Reformers, is on life support,” East says. “It barely registers in surveys. Perhaps ninety-five out of one hundred Christians in the world already inhabit a world without Protestantism.” 

East is not alone in these views. A few weeks before he published his article in First Things, Baylor University postdoctoral fellow Casey Spinks made a very similar argument in a Current article titled “Does Traditional Protestantism Have a Future?” Like East, Spinks suggested that the future looks bleak for a “Protestantism that cares about the creeds and confessions, the liturgy, sacraments, and doctrine, in both content and form.” 

“I suspect traditional Protestants will be faced with the choice to join the Non-Denom Church—whether they want to or not,” Spinks wrote. “Their denominations will either fail or become so small as to count as little more than versions of the networks formed by Non-Denom churches. Traditional churches will have lost their denominations and become Non-Denom churches by default. Or the remaining denominations will be populated only by surviving megachurches, which effectively will have changed each denomination’s culture into Non-Denom Church.”

Are Spinks and East correct? Will we see the imminent demise (or near-demise) of “traditional Protestantism” (that is, confessional Protestantism – the forms of Protestantism that conform to the sixteenth and seventeenth-century confessions)? I think that the answer is almost certainly no. 

We cannot prognosticate about the state of confessional Protestantism simply by looking at a snapshot of church membership statistics today. Instead, we must look at long-term trends over the course of centuries. And when we do, we’ll see that confessional or magisterial Protestantism was never as dominant as East and Spinks’s articles may lead us to imagine – which means that its small size today is less a sign of its decline than a confirmation of the limited reach it has always had. In fifty years, confessional Protestantism will probably still be with us – but it will likely be a small force just as it is today, and just as it has been for a long time.

Confessional Protestants Were Never a Majority of Global Christianity

From a global perspective, confessional Protestants have always appeared to be a pretty small minority among the world’s Christians. In 1600, when most Protestants probably could have been categorized as confessional or magisterial Protestants, Protestants were a very small force in word Christendom. They were almost exclusively concentrated in Europe; the continent was home to 99.2 percent of the world’s Protestants. But Europe itself was mostly Catholic and Orthodox; only 16 percent of Europeans were Protestant. And of the nearly 12.57 million Protestants in Europe, nearly all lived in northern and western Europe, with nearly 4 million (almost 25 percent of the global Protestant population) living in England alone. Meanwhile, Catholic missionaries were evangelizing the globe. In Japan alone, for instance, there were about 300,000 Catholics in 1600. 

Two hundred years later, in 1800, the situation had barely changed. Europe was still home to 85 percent of the world’s 43 million Protestants; most of the rest were people of European descent who lived in North America. (African Americans had not yet converted to Christianity in very large numbers, and only a very small number of indigenous Native Americans were Protestant). Since there were 204 million Christians in the world at that time – which was about 20 percent of the world’s population – Protestants accounted for only about 20 percent of all Christians (or about 4 percent of the world’s total population). What percentage of these Protestants could be classified as magisterial Protestants is difficult to say.

By one estimate, 88 percent of the 11 million people in the United Kingdom were at least “nominal Anglicans,” and since East doesn’t count Anglicans as magisterial Protestants, that brings the maximum potential number of magisterial Protestants in the world in 1800 down to barely over 30 million – especially after we also account for the Quakers, Methodists, Baptists, and Unitarians who also could not be classified as close adherents of the theology of Luther and Calvin.

By 1900, Europe accounted for only 63 percent of the world’s Protestant population, and North America accounted for about 30 percent. But with 93 percent of the world’s Protestant population living in Europe or North America, Protestantism still had made very few inroads in Asia, Africa, or Latin America, despite the concerted efforts of British and American missionaries. The world’s 133 million Protestants accounted for only 24 percent of the world’s 558 million Christians. At the time, there were 266 million Catholics in the world – exactly twice as many as the world’s total number of Protestants.

And by 1900, magisterial Protestants probably did not account for the majority of the world’s Protestants. In the United States, the largest denominational groups in 1900 were Methodist, followed by Baptist. One religious encyclopedia published near the beginning of the twentieth century put the world’s total number of Presbyterians at 5 million – most of which were in the United States, Scotland, and Canada. At the time, according to that same source, there were about 50 million Lutherans worldwide – the vast majority of whom lived in German-speaking countries or Scandinavia. If these numbers are correct, Lutherans and Presbyterians together accounted for about 41 percent of the world’s Protestants, but only 10 percent of the world’s total Christian population.

So, for the first three and a half centuries of magisterial or confessional Protestantism, we can say that this group always remained a minority of the world’s Christians. They never accounted for more than 20 percent of the world’s Christians, and in some years, they accounted for only 10 percent. They were concentrated mainly in Europe (or, in the nineteenth century, Europe and North America) for that entire period. They may have had profound intellectual influence. We may find great theological riches in the writings of Luther, Calvin, and their heirs. But we should not imagine some halcyon period when magisterial Protestants dominated global Christianity, because that age never existed. 

Magisterial Protestantism never had much appeal beyond the rather small minority of the world’s population that could trace their ancestry back to northern or western Europe. Even in North America, where magisterial Protestants had some influence for a while, most African Americans and Native Americans who became Christian did not become Presbyterians, Reformed Protestants, or Lutherans. Catholicism, Methodism, the Baptist tradition, and later Pentecostalism proved much more appealing to most non-whites than the theological traditions of Luther and Calvin ever did.

And now, what about the present? In 2017 (the most recent year for which I have statistics), there were 559 million Protestants in the world, 228 million of whom were in Africa. In other words, Africa, which had only 2 million Protestants in 1900, is now the home of 41 percent of the world’s Protestants. (By contrast, 61 million Protestants lived in North America in 2017, and 91 million lived in Europe – which means that Africa has more Protestants than North America and Europe combined, even when we count the most nominal of nominal Protestants in the West as part of the total). 

Because of the rapid growth of Christianity in the Global South, Christians now make up one-third of the world’s population – up from 25 percent in 1900. In fact, a higher percentage of the world’s population identify as Christian than ever before. 

But of course, most of these Christians are not magisterial Protestants – and the reason why is not because of jeans-wearing nondenominational pastors. Instead, it’s because of a phenomenal wave of Christian conversions in Africa and other parts of the Global South that has been driven by both Catholics (of whom there are nearly twice as many as all forms of Protestants combined, just as was the case a century ago) and charismatic Protestants, with a substantial contribution from Anglicanism and Methodism as well. 

To be sure, there are some magisterial Protestants in Africa – at least, if we define “magisterial Protestant” as a member of a Lutheran or Presbyterian church. Africa is currently home to about 20 million Presbyterians and at least 20 million Lutherans – which means these two denominational families may account for about 18 percent of the total number of African Protestants and about 5 percent of the total number of African Christians. By contrast, there are tens of millions of Anglicans in Africa and, by one estimate, more than 200 million Pentecostals. 

So, is magisterial Protestantism dying around the world? It was always very small compared to the number of Catholics or to the world’s total population, and it never succeeded in moving very far beyond Europe and America. In absolute numbers, there are more Lutherans and Presbyterians in the world today than there were in 1900. As a percentage of the world’s Christian population, they may appear smaller than they were in 1900 – dropping from 10 percent to 6 percent of the global Christian population – but this is not because large numbers of people suddenly decided that they wanted to exchange the Westminster or Augsburg Confession for the prosperity gospel teachings of a nondenominational megachurch pastor. Instead, it’s because non-magisterial forms of Christianity – and especially charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity, alongside Catholicism – have made astonishing gains in the Global South, where magisterial Protestantism was always fairly weak. 

In 1900, 93 percent of Protestants lived in the Global North (Europe and North America); by 2020, only 25 percent did. That’s an astonishingly rapid shift. And by 2050, the percentage of the world’s Protestants living in the Global North is expected to drop to only 16 percent. This doesn’t mean that magisterial Protestantism will disappear – but it does mean that as we have seen hundreds of millions of new converts embracing Christianity in the Global South, magisterial Protestantism (which was the product of the Global North) has appeared even less central in the global Christian story than it did before. There are still plenty of places where one can find magisterial Protestantism – but for the most part, it’s not the driver of global Christian conversions, which is why it appears so statistically insignificant.

What Does This Mean for the United States?

The United States has not exactly followed these global trends. American Christianity has always been far more Protestant than global Christianity, and in recent years, it has also been significantly less Pentecostal. So, what’s happening in the Global South is not exactly what’s happening in the American South. In other words, it may not be directly relevant to the question of why particular types of churches exist (or don’t exist) in Abilene, Texas. 

To make sense of American denominational membership patterns, we need to understand that the growth of particular American denominational groups has always been closely tied to ethnicity, social class, and region. 

It may be easy to forget today, but the denominations that East classifies as “via media” Protestant traditions – Reformed and Lutheran – exist today in the United States only in ethnically concentrated denominations. Lutheran churches were the imports of German and Scandinavian immigrants, and they haven’t really transcended those groups even today. That’s why in Maine, which had very few German or Scandinavian immigrants, there are only 21 Lutheran churches today by my count (18 associated with the ELCA and 3 with the Missouri Synod). By contrast, in North Dakota, which has a significantly lower population than Maine, there are 407 ELCA Lutheran churches and 76 congregations affiliated with the Missouri Synod. North Dakota also has seven churches affiliated with the American Association of Lutheran Churches, twelve with the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, and one congregation affiliated with the North American Lutheran Church. 

Not all of these churches may be well attended, but even accounting for the recent decline in mainline Protestantism, it’s still true that if you live in a region that was settled by German or Scandinavian immigrants, you probably won’t have to look far to find a place that is still worshiping in the Lutheran tradition. On the other hand, if you do not live near a place settled by Germans or Scandinavians – in other words, if you don’t live in the Midwest or Great Plains – Lutheran churches may be a lot fewer. That’s not a symptom of Lutheran decline; that’s simply a demographic reality that reflects the historic ethnic patterns of Lutheranism.  

And while it may be less obvious, American Presbyterianism was also originally an ethnic church, because it was primarily an import of Scottish and Scotch-Irish immigrants in the eighteenth century. In the colonial era, English Reformed Protestants were Puritans (who, in New England, became Congregationalists). Scottish Reformed Protestants were Presbyterians. Their beliefs were so closely aligned that in the early nineteenth century, Presbyterian and Congregationalists in the Northeast almost merged their denominations. But since they did not, the (mostly English) Congregationalists went on to become extraordinarily theologically liberal, with the vast majority eventually joining the United Church of Christ. The Presbyterians, by contrast, remained independent and continued to fragment and then recombine into various denominations. Both groups lost adherents to the Methodists and Baptists in the nineteenth century. But ultimately, Presbyterians fared better in terms of numbers. And because they valued an educated ministry – and were especially likely to attract educated adherents – they tended to decline in areas that were more rural and less college-educated while thriving in college towns or among the upper middle class in urban areas. And this is still true today.

To find out whether there’s a Presbyterian church near you, you should ask the questions: Am I in an urban area? Am I in an area that was historically settled by Scots? Is there a high percentage of people with college degrees in this area?

If the answer to one or more of those questions is correct, the answer is probably yes – there is a Presbyterian church in the area. And if the answer to all three questions is correct, the answer is almost certainly yes – in all likelihood, you will have multiple Presbyterian churches to choose from.

That doesn’t mean that Presbyterians will be the majority of Christians in the United States or anywhere else. Indeed, they never were. But there are plenty of Presbyterian churches that are not on “life support,” as East describes. Conservative Presbyterian (especially PCA) church plants in urban areas often have the feel of vibrant communities of young professionals. Suburban PCA churches are often filled with young families who have moved into conservative Presbyterianism from some other form of evangelicalism (usually of a Baptist variety) and are excited to be examining the scriptures from a Reformed perspective.

So, if you’re in a growing metropolitan or suburban area with a substantial contingent of college-educated people, you will likely find that theologically minded magisterial Protestantism is more alive today than it was a half century ago. You will find a greater number of conservative magisterial Protestant churches, with people who are serious about their faith and who value the distinctive aspects of their tradition.

This is even true of Abilene, Texas, where East works. When I read his statement that he “wouldn’t have a clue” where to “find a bona fide representative of magisterial Protestantism” in his town, because “you will struggle to find a single congregation in line with the Reformation vision,” I was taken aback. Surely there were several magisterial Protestant churches in Abilene, I thought.

Indeed there were. I found three Lutheran churches in Abilene (two of which are affiliated with the Missouri Synod) and three Presbyterian churches (two of which are PCUSA and one of which is OPC). One of the PCUSA churches features photos of congregational worship on its website that depict a robed choir and a pastor wearing a stole, robe, and tie – which suggests to me that the church probably practices traditional worship and checks off all of East’s categories for liturgical Protestantism, even if the theology of its denomination might be liberal. But if one is looking for a firmly conservative recreation of the Calvinism of the Reformation, the OPC congregation would probably be a perfect fit. The church’s website states on its homepage that it is dedicated to “the study of God's holy, infallible, and inerrant Word, according to the Reformed faith taught in the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms and through the faithful administration of the Sacraments.” That sure sounds to me like a Calvinist version of East’s definition of magisterial Protestantism.

But someone might protest that even if I’ve managed to find three or four churches in Abilene that could fit East’s definition of magisterial Protestantism, that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the dozens of nondenominational community churches and Baptist congregations that dominate the religious landscape. Doesn’t this only confirm East’s argument that magisterial Protestantism is on the verge of extinction?

Actually, it would confirm East’s thesis only if we could document a pronounced decline in magisterial Protestantism in Abilene in recent decades – that is, if we could find a point in the past when magisterial Protestantism was much stronger in the region and could then demonstrate a particular rate of decline. But I could find no such evidence. On the contrary, when I looked at a 1955 Abilene city directory, I saw that the city at the time had only two Lutheran churches and two Presbyterian churches – compared to nineteen Church of Christ congregations and thirty-four Baptist churches. Maybe the nondenominational churches whose presence East laments didn’t exist in Abilene seventy years ago, but magisterial Protestantism as East defines it was at least as hard to find in Abilene in the 1950s as it is today, and it was dwarfed by the massive number of low-church Baptist and Church of Christ congregations. Today, one can at least find theologically conservative, serious-minded adherents of Reformation principles at either the Missouri Synod or OPC congregations in town – which I’m not sure was the case in 1955, a time when mainline Lutheran and Presbyterian churches may have been culturally conservative but were not exactly known for their faithful adherence to every aspect of confessional orthodoxy.  

What Is Declining – and What Will Remain?

In short, the trend lines don’t suggest that magisterial Protestantism is dying or is on the verge of extinction. Instead, they suggest that magisterial Protestantism has always been a small minority of both global and American Christianity, and that it is likely to remain so – but that it is not dying. 

What is rapidly declining, I think, is the liberal or mainline expression of magisterial Protestantism – and what’s left has, at least at the denominational level, become increasingly theologically and politically liberal. But even here, I don’t expect traditions to completely die out. Instead, if a denomination gets small enough, it might merge. Today the Evangelical and Reformed Church of the mid-twentieth century no longer exists; it merged with the UCC. I can easily imagine some of the other mainline Protestant churches of a magisterial Protestant heritage merging with other similar denominations when possible – or, even more likely, continuing to exist indefinitely in smaller form. 

But if the mainline remnants of magisterial Protestantism are shrinking and the numerical growth of conservative forms of magisterial Protestantism has mostly stalled (though without any significant shrinkage, as yet), I don’t think that nondenominational churches are to blame. Instead, the decline of the Protestant mainline began in the late 1960s – before nondenominational churches had become much of a phenomenon – and many of the young people who left the mainline left church altogether instead of going into evangelicalism. But rather than vanish altogether, I suspect that the Protestant mainline will regroup into a smaller, more cohesive, and more monolithically politically liberal Religious Left that will serve as a counter to the numerically larger (and more predominantly southern and Republican) conservative evangelicalism. This form of mainline Protestantism won’t be a statistically significant part of global Christianity – but it won’t become completely extinct.  

As for the conservative form of magisterial Protestantism in the United States, I suspect that its future will look a lot like its present state and its recent past – that is, it will continue to appeal to a small minority of college-educated (mostly white) evangelicals who find low-church evangelicalism too theologically vapid and are looking for something deeper. 

But because conservative magisterial Protestantism is associated primarily with the college-educated, it will never become the dominant form of Protestantism in the United States. More than two-thirds of evangelicals – the group that now comprises the majority of churchgoing Protestants in the United States – lack a college degree. More than 50 percent live in the South. 

As mainline Protestantism has declined – and as the center of gravity in American evangelicalism has shifted to the South – the face of American Protestantism has started to look a lot like what Christianity in Abilene, Texas, has looked like for decades: very Baptist (and non-denominational), with all the features of the Bible Belt. But just as magisterial Protestantism has not disappeared in Abilene, it has not disappeared in the rest of the country either. Nor is it likely to do so. 

This should be both humbling and reassuring to those who are conservative magisterial Protestants. It should be humbling to realize the limits of the magisterial Protestant tradition. Magisterial Protestantism failed to appeal to make significant inroads in the non-Western world. For the most part, it is not been magisterial Protestantism that has made Africa Christian. It has not been magisterial Protestantism that has sustained evangelicalism in the one part of the United States where it’s still reasonably healthy: the South. With only a few exceptions, magisterial Protestantism has very limited appeal to most Hispanic and African American Christians. And it has never been strong in Latin America. Its appeal has primarily been concentrated among college-educated populations. Even if we think that some magisterial Protestantism is the most biblically faithful, truest expression of historic Christianity, those of us who believe in the Reformation doctrines should give thanks to God that the Lord has raised up other groups of Christians to evangelize people who have never read a seventeenth-century confession of faith – because if that had not been the case, much of the world’s Christian population would still be unreached with the gospel.

But this understanding that magisterial Protestantism has always played only a relatively small role in global Christianity should also be reassuring, because when we see how small a percentage of the world’s Christians identify with a magisterial Protestant denomination, we’ll realize that this is not necessarily a new phenomenon – and it doesn’t mean that magisterial Protestantism is shrinking today. Instead, magisterial Protestantism still has an important role to play in communicating the doctrines of grace to intellectually minded, mostly college-educated people. Those aren’t the majority of people in either the world or the United States. But they are people who need to discover the gospel in the written word – and in many cases, there will be a magisterial Protestant church to point them toward it. That was true in previous decades. And it’s even more true today. 

Thanks be to God.