The Incredible Shrinking Liberal Protestantism

It is common knowledge that most mainstream Protestant religious denominations are losing membership, but some denominations are shrinking more rapidly than others. In particular, those denominations that are widely known as the liberal Protestant churches in the United States and the other English-speaking countries have seen their membership numbers decrease at a catastrophic rate, almost certainly because of their Left-liberal agendas. All of these denominations have a good deal in common, which may be summarised as follows:

1. Each has an explicitly and pervasive Left-liberal agenda, and is virtually certain to adopt the latest cause of the contemporary Western Left.

2. Each of these denominations has nothing to say about individual behaviour—let alone about “sin” and “salvation”—as opposed to the alleged ills of Western society.

3. Each is explicitly in favour of gay clergymen and same-sex marriage.

4. Each is deeply hostile to the State of Israel, singling it out for condemnation by criteria they apply to no other country, including those which are endemically murderous and totalitarian.

5. Each of these denominations is losing members at a truly incredible rate.

One might begin this survey by looking at an archetypal example of all of these characteristics, the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA). To those who think of Presbyterianism in terms of John Knox and his successors excoriating Sabbath breakers, fornicators and drunkards with visions of the hellfire to come as their certain fate, the current stance of this denomination will come as a surprise. Those who think that my description is a distortion are invited to view the Church’s own website, as well as the excellent Wikipedia article on the PCUSA. The Church’s website is a compendium advocating every conceivable Left-liberal mantra: “environmental ministries” which “celebrate Earth Day Sunday”; “Global Food Crisis: Curricula [sic] for Study and/or Monthly Fasts”; “The World Council of Churches to Pray on Hiroshima Day”, and so on and so on. There is one foreign policy issue, above all, with which the PCUSA is simply obsessed: its deep hostility to Israel. Not towards, say, Saudi Arabia, where no Christian may even set foot, or towards Syria, whose government has massacred 200,000 of its own people, or to Iran, but always and only Israel. The PCUSA has passed resolution after resolution condemning every aspect of Israeli policy—but no aspect of Islamic or Arab terrorism against Israel (or anyone else). It condemns “Christian Zionism” and sanctions “the continuing funding of conversionary activities aimed at Jews”. The PCUSA is also committed to the boycotting campaign aimed exclusively against Israel. Its website prominently highlights such one-sided concerns as “Palestinian Children in Military Detention” and “Boycott Israeli Settlement Products” almost endlessly.

What about the persecution of their Christian co-religionists throughout the world, especially in the Muslim world? Open Doors is a neutral organisation which tracks and publicises the persecution of Christians around the world. It was founded in 1955 in order to smuggle Bibles into communist countries, and appears to be neutral and objective. According to Open Doors, “millions of Christians around the world today are facing persecution for their faith in Christ”. It maintains a “Watch List” of the fifty worst countries for the persecution of Christians. Number One on the current list, unsurprisingly, is North Korea, which is followed by eight Muslim countries and Nigeria, where the Islamic sect Boko Haram is slaughtering Christians. Of the forty-eight countries where the persecution of Christians is most intense, twenty-eight are predominantly Muslim, and the rest a mix of residual Marxist states like Laos and countries with an Islamic insurgency problem. One of the countries on its list is the Palestinian Territories, where “the number of Christians is diminishing and the influence of radical Islam is growing … Christian converts from a Muslim background are persecuted the most, followed by all local Christian believers … in Gaza.” Israel is not on the Open Doors list, and apparently gets a clean bill of health.

While constantly belittling Israel, the attitude of the PCUSA towards their persecuted fellow Christians around the world appears to be quite simple: drop dead. The sect has absolutely nothing to say about their suffering co-religionists, possibly because they are believing Christians.

Since the 1990s the PCUSA has gone ever closer to endorsing homosexuality and same-sex marriage and, in 2014, voted to allow same-sex weddings in their churches, performed by their ministers, changing its definition of marriage from “between a man and a woman” to “between two people, traditionally between a man and a woman”. In former times, one assumes that Presbyterianism was centrally concerned with individual sin and with salvation in the next world. It apparently has nothing to say about this today.

The effects on its membership numbers of the move of the PCUSA to the extreme Left on every imaginable issue has been far from what the leaders of the denomination were presumably expecting: the decline in its membership has been simply staggering. At its peak in 1964, the Church had 4.25 million members. By 1985 this figure had declined to 3.1 million; by 1995 to 2.7 million. Thereafter, the downhill slope became ever more acute. Between 2000 and 2014, the PCUSA lost nearly 900,000 members, with its numbers decreasing by 419,000 in the four years between 2010 and 2014 alone. In 2014 it had 1,667,767 members, a 61 per cent decline from its peak in the mid-1960s, while the American population as a whole has nearly doubled.

The Church’s complacency in the face of these statistics is, to an outsider, simply incomprehensible. Any business with a similar track record of abject failure would have sacked its entire management—that is, if it had not already filed for bankruptcy. Many observers predict that the PCUSA will be virtually extinct in a generation or so: an institution which has committed suicide through political correctness.

The PCUSA is only one of many liberal Protestant denominations which have adopted the same ideology and have shared the same fate. There is, for instance, the United Church of Christ (UCC) a largely Congregationalist American sect founded in its present form in 1957. Among the Left-liberal causes which the UCC has supported are: abortion rights; the United Farm Workers’ Union; the “Wilmington Ten”, a group of North Carolina blacks controversially jailed in 1971 for arson and violence; demands for an official apology to native Hawaiians for America’s overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1893 (I’m serious); and, needless to say, same-sex marriage. In 2014 the UCC sued the State of North Carolina for not permitting same-sex marriage.

As with the PCUSA and its ilk, when in doubt, kick the Jews is among the UCC’s guiding principles. Unsurprisingly, the UCC has called for divestment from companies “which profit from the continuing Israel-Palestine dispute”, and has called for Israel to tear down its security wall (which was erected in order to stop the numerous Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel, and has succeeded in stopping them almost totally). As to Islamic terrorism there is, needless to say, total silence.

Like the PCUSA, the UCC has experienced a catastrophic loss of membership. Since its peak in 1964—just before the nihilism of the 1960s took hold—the UCC had 2.1 million members. Membership declined to 1.7 million in 1984, to 1.3 million in 2004, and then to only 979,000 in 2014, a decrease of 53 per cent in half a century, and of 23 per cent during the last decade. Attendance at Sunday worship has also declined accordingly, with 44 per cent of UCC services attended by fifty or fewer persons in 2013, compared with 29 per cent in 2002.

Very similar Left-liberal agendas, followed by very similar massive shrinkages in membership, have also been the rule among all of the other liberal Protestant denominations in the United States, such as the Evangelical Lutherans, the Episcopal Church of the United States, and the Society of Friends (Quakers). One might assume that the Quakers, with their long history of pacifism, anti-slavery, support for prison reform and women’s education, and their lack of dogmatic doctrine and of clergy, would be a popular option in America today. On the contrary, however, the number of Quakers in the United States has declined from about 121,000 in 1972 to only 86,000 today.

These American trends have also occurred among liberal Protestant churches throughout the English-speaking world. For instance, the United Church of Canada, formed in 1925 from among most Methodists, Congregationalists and Presbyterians, has for years adopted a very similar Left-liberal agenda as its counterparts in the United States, and has likewise experienced a parallel catastrophic decline in membership, from 1,064,000 in 1965 to 450,886 in 2014, an incredible drop of 58 per cent. As an article by Margaret Wente in the Toronto Globe and Mail put it in 2012:

Two weeks from now, the United Church of Canada will assemble in Ottawa for its 41st General Council. The top item on its agenda is a motion calling for a boycott of products from Israeli settlements. Fortunately, nobody cares what the United Church thinks about Israeli settlements, or anything else for that matter, because the United Church doesn’t matter any more … Today, the Church is literally dying. The average age of its members is 65. They believe in many things, but they do not necessarily believe in God.

Indeed not. A recent report in a Canadian church newspaper also noted the plight of “[a] minister in the [United Church of Canada] who is an avowed atheist”, but who “is fighting to keep her credentials, as a regional body investigates the effectiveness of her ministry”.

From all of this, one key question emerges: Why on earth do these churches continue to pursue an ideological agenda which is manifestly and incontrovertibly suicidal? No one, of course, would claim that there is a deliberate strategy by leftist clerics to drive out their church’s moderates, and thus gain control of that denomination and its assets. Several possibilities suggest themselves. Young left-wing activists who formally belong to a church—this is far more common in the United States than elsewhere—become ministers, bringing with them their naive but utopian worldview, oblivious to the fact that many of their congregants are horrified at their views; they are also oblivious to the shrinking size of their congregations.

Among these churches, there appears to be a persistent expectation that there is a vast untapped left-wing clientele potentially ready to join, who will match or exceed in size, and replace, the alienated moderates and conservatives who have left. Presumably this new congregation would include gays, university students, feminists, radical activists, refugees and ethnic minorities. But no such untapped Left-liberal clientele exists: the notion that it does is wishful thinking, if not sheer fantasy. The radical component among the potential church members are overwhelmingly secular, while the oppressed component of refugees and minorities are religious fundamentalists, often with extremely conservative views on matters like homosexuality. (The Roman Catholic Church has arguably fared better precisely because its views on sexual matters are so conservative.) These churches are also prey to the obvious vicious circle in any such strategy: as moderates leave, their leadership consists more and more of avowed leftists, driving out still more moderates.

The bottom line is that “ordinary” members and traditional families are leaving in droves, with no end in sight to the downhill progression. The Episcopal Church of the United States, another liberal Protestant denomination, experienced a decline among children in its Sunday schools from 880,000 in 1965 to 297,000 in 2001, and to 185,000 in 2013. It is likely that the other liberal Protestant churches have seen a similar decrease in their Sunday school numbers.

Does Australia have any parallel to this situation? The closest mainstream denomination to the liberal American sects is probably the Uniting Church, formed in 1977 from among most Methodists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists (although, from the first, conservative elements among these groups declined to join). The Uniting Church is well known as a “progressive-liberal church, ordaining gay people and supporting progressive causes”. However, and in contrast to its American counterparts, it lacks the gung-ho, in-your-face radicalism of the North Americans, except possibly for its support of refugees; it has no visible policy on Israel/Palestine. It is, however, apparently declining in membership in much the same way as the Americans, although perhaps more slowly.

The most recent Australian census found that between 2006 and 2011 the percentage of the population who gave “Uniting Church” as their religion declined from 5.7 to 5.0 per cent of the total. This was proportionally larger than the decline among Anglicans (from 18.7 to 17.1 per cent) and much more than among Catholics (from 25.8 to 25.3 per cent). While immigrant religions—Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists—grew in size, there were also increases among the stricter, more fundamentalist Christian denominations, such as the Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Pentecostals, contrary to the general trend to secularisation. Internal Uniting Church surveys have apparently revealed even more drastic declines, with the number of Sunday worshippers decreasing by 40 per cent between 1990 and 2013. On a typical Sunday, fewer than 100,000 people in the whole of Australia attend a Uniting Church service.

It seems clear that, throughout the Western world, liberal and “progressive” churches face continuing and unending decline, if not actual extinction, while the stricter, more fundamentalist denominations are increasing, at last in comparative terms. Religious bodies can increase in size in the Western world, although to do so they must, it seems, eschew the secular mainstream. For instance, Charedi (strictly orthodox) Jews have increased enormously in number since they were virtually wiped out in the Holocaust, as well as by Jewish acculturation in the West and forced secularisation in the Soviet Union. From probably less than 100,000 or so in 1945, there are now an estimated 1.5 to 2 million Charedi Jews in Israel, America, and elsewhere. To survive and flourish, they have banned television, banned most sites on the internet, and established a range of day schools and other institutions. Intermarriage with other Jews (let alone non-Jews) and “dropouts” from their communities are minimal, while they marry young and have extraordinarily large families. Their intellectual life revolves almost wholly around the traditional study of the Jewish scriptures and rabbinical writings.

The Charedi lifestyle is not for everyone (to put it mildly), and may well be criticised on any number of valid grounds, but it is a striking formula not merely for survival, but for flourishing. No doubt there are other ways for churches to survive and grow in today’s Western world, but adopting the agendas of the liberal Protestant denominations is not one of them. Within a generation, their churches are likely to be little more than places to conduct gay weddings and the funerals of their elderly members.