RealClearPolitics - Mainline Protestants' Dead End.
And here the press reports missed the one really big, obvious headline: Mainline Protestants are dying out.
The study's authors summarize: "Ninety percent of the decline comes from the non-Catholic segment of the Christian population, largely from the mainline denominations, including Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians/Anglicans and the United Church of Christ. These groups, whose proportion of the American population shrank from 18.7 percent in 1990 to 17.2 percent in 2001, all experienced sharp numerical declines this decade and now constitute just 12.9 percent." Overall Christianity has been holding its own in recent years. But since 2001, the liberal mainline Protestants have lost a third of their adherents.
"It looks like the two-party system of American Protestantism -- mainline versus evangelical -- is collapsing," said Mark Silk, director of the Public Values Program. "A generic form of evangelicalism is emerging as the normative form of non-Catholic Christianity in the United States."
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