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Sunday, July 16th, 2017

“Mainline” churches are emptying. The political effects could be huge

Author:     Lyman Stone
Source:     VOX
Publication Date:     Jul 14, 2017, 9:40am EDT
 Link: “Mainline” churches are emptying. The political effects could be huge
Stephan:   Several readers have written to ask me why I seem to feel so strongly about the transformation of Christianity in the United States from what used to be known as mainline, the Christianity of my youth, to what I have come to think of as the fundamentalist Christian cult, and its linkage to conservative Republican politics. A cult that obsessively invokes Jesus yet whose actions and attitudes are antithetical to His teachings. So today's in today's edition I have decided to focus on some of these elements. Fundamentalism, as I have said before, is the same regardless of the religious sect. It always has the same elements: 1) a sense of superiority, judgment, and self-righteousness, 2) a sense of persecution 3) sexual dysfunction 4) an obsessive need to subordinate and control the half of the population that have vaginas. Fundamentalism also correlates with an overactive right amygdala and conservative politics. So we will start today with the the transition itself.

Mainline church

In April, the New York Times’s Ross Douthat wrote a column arguing — appropriately for a Sunday opinion piece — that liberals need to go to church. More specifically, he argued: “The wider experience of American politics suggests that as liberalism de-churches it struggles to find a nontransactional organizing principle, a persuasive language of the common good.”

For a theologically confessional Lutheran and politically conservative Republican like me, this is an interesting suggestion. How much of the cultural and political change we have observed in the past 20 years can be explained by the quiet death of the “mainlines”?

For readers not familiar with Christian denominational classifications, “mainline” is the term that students of American religious life use to refer to more theologically or politically liberal white-majority churches. Since Sunday morning remains America’s most segregated hour, experts separate “historically black Protestant” churches into their own group, and then divide the white churches into various segments.

Mainline churches today remain diverse but tend to share a cluster of overlapping values: They may endorse […]

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