The Great Evangelical Decline

[DeSwiss]

The Great Evangelical Decline


Christine Wicker | The Huffington Post | Posted June 3, 2008 | 07:57 PM (EST)
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What Baptist leaders have known for years is finally public: The Southern Baptist Convention is a denomination in decline. Half of the SBC's 43,000 churches will have shut their doors by 2030 if current trends continue. And unless God provides a miracle, the trends will continue. The denomination's growth rate has been declining since the 1950s. The conservative/fundamentalist takeover 30 years ago was supposed to turn the trend around; it didn't make a bit of difference.

Leaders said it did. Reporters and politicians believed it did. But the numbers kept going down until, finally, they have become obvious to everyone. Evangelical faith has been dropping since 1900, when 42 percent of the U.S. claimed that distinction. Every year, Religious Right evangelicals, such as those who lead the Southern Baptists, are a smaller proportion of the country. Every year, their core values are violated more flagrantly by the media, scientific discovery and mainstream behavior. Every election, politicians promise to serve them and then don't because evangelicals lack the power to make them. What all this means is that we were duped.

All the hype proclaiming an evangelical resurgence was merely that - hype, a furious shout from a faith losing its grip, manipulation by a relatively small group of dedicated, focused, political power-seekers. The long decline of Southern Baptist faith is critical to the entire evangelical movement because the Southern Baptist Convention, which claims 16 million members, is the biggest evangelical denomination in the country, almost six times as large as the next biggest predominately white evangelical denomination. The second-largest evangelical group, the National Association of Evangelicals, has claimed 30 million members. Their churches actually have 7.6 million, tops. Most of those are having the same problems the Baptists are having.

As the true picture of evangelicals' problems has developed, panicked leaders are splitting into camps. Some say that the church is lax, soft, sold out. That what's needed is an even bigger dose of the medicine that the SBC fundamentalist takeover delivered. More authority, more strict interpretations of the Bible, more sermons about sin and suffering and sacrifice, more rigor about who is and who isn't getting to go to heaven. Others say the problem is image. Evangelicals have been seen as mean-spirited and narrow. Caring about the environment and giving more attention to the poor and needy will turn it around. Get out of politics, they say. Play down abortion and gay rights. That will fix the problem.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-wicker/the-great-evangelical-dec_b_105009.html">MORE

- I hesitate to boil it down this way, but I think what she's saying is that the Fundamenatlists and the Evangelicals are in their "death throes."

And that's never a good sign when you hear that these days....
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DeSwiss


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[Lydia Leftcoast]

1. It's happened before

During the mid 18th century, there was a huge evangelical revival in the northern American colonies called The Great Awakening. Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards was one of its principal leaders, and by all accounts he was a charismatic hellfire preacher (his most famous sermon is "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God") who packed 'em in and caused listeners to faint and even have convulsions.

The frenzy died down within a few decades, and the places where the revival had been most intense became known as the "burnt over areas," with the majority of the people indifferent or hostile to religion.

It's not widely known, but as revealed in an American Experience documentary on Spiritualism, the towns of New England and New York were actually quite secularized in the early nineteenth century, and the most influential institution in most towns was not the church but the Masonic lodge. It was in this environment that Spiritualism, Mormonism, and Seventh Day Adventism arose, all of them in upstate New York.

I can see a lot of the megachurches losing ground, especially if and when economic hard times hit despite members' adherence to the "prosperity gospel."

[pop goes the weasel]

2. you are off on some key items

The Burnt Over district does refer to upstate NY, but in the 19th century in the wake of Finney's preaching and the boom-town phenomena related to the building of the Erie Canal, which challenged traditional family structures. It was in the framework of this "second Great Awakening" that the religions you mentioned got their start, though they were first heavily influenced by the twenty year old Southern frontier revivalist movement known as "restorationism."

Edwards was a charismatic preacher, but his influence was well over by the time of the American Revolution, and can be seen as part of a last attempt by Puritans to maintain control over an increasingly secular and diverse New England. He would have had little impact on upstate New York, because the natives of upstate New York, the Iroquois, were not interested in Puritan theology.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. Thanks for the correx

:-)

[DeSwiss]

7. Generally...

...I would agree that comparing the historical similarities in the ebb and flow of religious movements can help somewhat as a means of understanding part of the context for today's changes. However I think that the losses of support for organized religion today is different. If for no other reason than the huge differences in the lives of most people between those times and now which must also be taken into account.

At minimum, there is significant difference in the level of education and general prosperity of people when compared to those earlier movements. And people simply didn't have as many alternatives of understanding things (i.e. scientific). Back then, religious explanations could easily triumph and win others over without challenge or contradiction.

But ultimately religious dogma relies upon apocalyptic and end-time scenarios which I think most people just find difficult if not impossible to maintain their fervor for. Christian dogma initially preached that the end of the world and return of the Messiah would come -- "soon."

And like so much else in religion, "soon" is a relative term.

- BTW, I read that sermon. Whew! I'm surprised no one died from fright during the service.

[pop goes the weasel]

3. doesn't take into account the "independents"

The SBC hardly has a lock on evangelicalism. What tends to happen with the evangelical protestants is that constant infighting causes them to break away into new, "purer" sects.

[DeSwiss]

8. I believe that the author is extrapolating....

...from the experience of membership decline in the SBC and making a general assumption of all others based upon that. Of course it would difficult to measure the relative decline of the independent church's rolls given that they are -- independent. So, therefore they have no records or other demographic information which is collected at a central place from which to make such judgment.

[HamdenRice]

5. The article is confusing evangelicals with conservative Christians

I don't see much evidence in the decline of Christian evangelicalism (or more broadly charismatic Christianity).

I see a decline of Christian conservativism. I'm sure that given the last 7 years of political catastrophe, egged on by right wing Christian leaders, evangelicals are simply moving on to less politicized churches.

[DeSwiss]

9. I would agree....

...that the author makes little distinction between the esoterica of Christianity when it comes to the specific strains of religious literalists and evangelicals. There has been, however, a decline in the populations of many born-again type churches, many of which belong to the SBC and/or similar groups.

An example of this population decline can be by the SBC (in a total about-face of their historical past), have recently been making an outreach effort to many predominately black baptist churches:

Mostly white Southern Baptists diversify for future

By JACQUELINE L. SALMON • The Washington Post • February 17, 2008

WASHINGTON — Seven years ago, the Rev. Eric Redmond never imagined himself leading a congregation in the overwhelmingly white Southern Baptist Convention.

Now, the young Temple Hills, Md., minister is the second vice president of the 16 million-member denomination and the highest-ranking African-American in the convention. He is a representative of the changing times confronting Southern Baptists and other mostly white Protestant denominations.

Faced with a crisis of aging and departing members, the nation's largest non-Catholic Christian bodies — Southern Baptists, United Methodists, Lutherans and Presbyterians — are reaching out to minorities in ways they never had.

Yet, while local churches often remain predominantly black or white, the outreach does result in a more diverse national organization. By establishing churches in minority communities, changing worship practices, electing minorities to leadership positions and purging racism from their attitudes, the faiths are seeking to draw in communities of color to boost stagnating or falling membership. The consequences of ignoring minorities, they warn, are dire.

"You can almost calculate the time when we close the door and turn off the lights if we don't become a more diverse church," said Sherman Hicks, executive director of multicultural ministries for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, a 4.9 million-member denomination that is 97 percent white.

[knitter4democracy]

6. SBC is a fundamentalist church, not evangelical.

Yes, they use evangelical tools, but evangelicals, like the Methodists, Nazarenes, and Wesleyans, don't believe in the Bible the same way. Fundamentalists say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God and should be interpreted literally. Evangelicals believe that the Bible is chock-full of metaphor and shouldn't be interpreted literally all the time. Sure, there's membership cross-over between churches, but if you look at what their theology says and their preachers interpret, there's a big difference.

From what I've heard, there's been a decline in the smaller churches across the Christian spectrum for awhile. Mega-churches are still doing okay, but that's probably because they can absorb the constant membership turnover more easily. When I was an evangelical, it was almost an article of faith that you could leave the church whenever you wanted because the preacher or someone else said the wrong thing or because you didn't like the new music director or whatever. There's always another church with another preacher to listen to, so it's not unusual to see lots of turnover in individual churches.

[DeSwiss]

10. While I agree....

....with the distinctions you make between Fundamentalists versus Evangelicals, it does appear that based upon information from many of the nationally organized churches there seems to be an overall decline in membership.

[knitter4democracy]

11. I think that's true.

Interesting. I wonder about the mega-churches, too. Are they seeing a decline in long-term membership, and how much turnover are they seeing?