If Ernest Hemingway were to interview American mainline Protestantism in 2025, the conversation would go something like this: “How did you go spiritually bankrupt?” “Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.”
There seems little doubt that we are now approaching that second, sudden phase. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has this year closed its foreign mission agency. This move is a sign of the denomination’s financial struggles, but it is also the logical outworking of the kind of squeamishness about missionary work that the religious pluralism of the PCUSA engenders.
Additionally, an article by Chris Mondics in the Spectator World’s August edition details how progressivism has hollowed out the institutions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, focusing in particular on its seminaries. Their decline has indeed been sudden. I worked for many years near the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, enjoyed cordial friendships with faculty, and even served as the first external reader in their PhD program. Now that seminary is no more. Mondics served for seven years on the board of its successor, the United Lutheran Seminary. His eye-witness account of the institution is sad but predictable, recounting how it has been dragged into irrelevance by its commitment to the progressive politics of the wider world. While both the PCUSA and the ELCA may be rich in property and endowments, their free-falling membership points to a future of churches empty both of people and of faith.
This sudden bankruptcy has been years in the making. Mainline Protestantism lost interest in the transcendent truths of Christianity and married the spirit of the age generations ago. In the first half of the twentieth century, this made it the vehicle of anti-communism and, from the perspective of today, the handmaid of the political right. In the 1960s, with the civil rights movement, it pivoted to the left and has maintained that progressive direction ever since, as displayed on countless church signs throughout the country.
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