Some two decades ago, former
pastor-turned-political scientist and researcher, Ryan P. Burge, who was raised
Southern Baptist, found a more comfortable home for his faith in an American
Baptist Churches USA (ABC/USA) congregation.
“I like the liturgy of the Mainline (Church),” Burge told The Christian
Post in a recent interview. “We do call
and response, we sing hymns, I like hymns. I think a lot of Evangelicals now have gotten
a little too obsessed with praise and worship music for my liking,” he said of
his preference. “I’m kind of an old soul
that way. I want to read the creeds. I want to have responsive readings, I want to
have an organ playing, and I want to sing hymns. That’s sort of how the best expression for my
faith is — those things.”
The ABC/USA churches is considered a
mainline denomination, and for Burge, this brand of Christianity, which sits in
the middle of extremism and unbelief, is a “perfect fit” for a “doubter” like
him. “The American Baptist Church was a
perfect fit for someone like me. It’s a
tradition dating back to the Civil War,” Burge explains in his latest book, The
Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations Is Hurting
Democracy, Faith, and Us, released by Brazos Press, a division of Baker
Publishing Group.
“When the majority of Baptists in the
South wanted to allow missionaries to own slaves, abolitionist Baptists broke
away and formed the Northern Baptist Convention, which was later rebranded the
American Baptist Church,” he writes. “The
denomination has always emphasized a middle path. A local church decides who its pastor can be. If the pastor is a woman, so be it. If a church wants to affirm LGBTQ +
individuals, the national headquarters can’t do anything about it. For American Baptists, each believer gets to
make up their own mind about how to interpret the Bible. It isn’t the pastor’s job to tell them what to
think.”
Burge, who says he wrote the book from
his position as a social scientist, further explained to ChristianPost (CP)
that moderate Christians allow what the “majority of Americans agree with.” “If the majority of Americans believe that
two men should be able to get married, that's moderate. If the majority of Americans think that women
should have access to abortion, that's moderate. I try not to make any sort of normative
discussions about what I think moderate or conservative is,” he says.
“I think that’s the biggest criticism of
the book is what I call moderate, a lot of more conservative Evangelicals would
call liberal,” he reveals. “I don’t know
how to square that problem. I always
joke, if you’re an atheist, anyone to your right, basically, is a fascist, and
if you’re an Evangelical, anyone to your left is basically a communist. And I think that’s sort of the problem, for
me, it’s just a very empirical decision. If your opinion agrees with what most
Americans agree with, then you’re a moderate on that specific issue.”
After joining the ABC/USA, Burge would
go on to become a pastor in the denomination. He served at First Baptist Church of Mount
Vernon in IL for 17.5 years until dwindling membership forced its closure in
July 2024. Now he is worried about the
future of moderate Christianity in America.
The polarization of American religion,
he argues in his book, has been shrinking the available space for millions of
moderate Christians. And if the trend
continues, mainline churches could be extinct in much of the U.S. in two or
three decades.
“At one point, about half of all
Americans were part of this moderate, mainline tradition. In twenty or thirty years, if current trends
continue as predicted, the mainline tradition will largely be extinct across
many parts of the United States,” he explains.
Using a combination of narrative,
graphs, charts, and other data points, Burge traces the trajectory of
Protestant Christianity and Catholicism across more than 200 pages in his
book. He also explores how religious and
political polarization has led to the collapse of the mainline church and the
rise of Evangelicals and the religious nones — people with no formal religious
affiliation. He further offers what he
believes is a healthier way forward and suggests that the Church needs to
change course.
“The religious landscape of the United
States has never looked starker than it does today. There are huge geographical swaths of America
where the only place a Protestant can worship on a Sunday morning is an
Evangelical church that takes a literalist view of the Bible and believes that
women have no role in spiritual leadership,” Burge writes. “The vibrant religious marketplace that was
pervasive for most of U.S. history has been replaced by a type of faith that
certainly appeals to a subset of the country but is objectionable, if not
downright repulsive, to a significant number of Americans,” he adds. “In short, American religion has become an
‘all or none’ proposition — conservative Evangelical religion or none at all. This leaves tens of millions of theological
and political moderates with no place to find community and spiritual
edification, or to work collectively to solve societal problems.”
Burge told CP that the mainline Church
began declining because it “succeeded so well.”
“It failed because it succeeded so well, because the average American
started believing a lot of what the mainline believed, and I’ve said this many
times on podcasts. The mainline became
too much like a country club. With just
a little bit of Jesus sprinkled on top,” he says. “They didn’t take Jesus seriously enough, and
a lot of people said, ‘Well, why don’t we go to the country club then? We’ll have more fun, and I can drink there.”
Mainline churches catering to things in
society, such as same-sex marriage and transgenderism, are also contributing
factors, Burge admits. “A lot of
mainline clergy feel like their response to the power of evangelicalism is to
become even more proud of their liberal beliefs. And how many rainbow flags we can fly, and how
many Black Lives Matter signs we can put up on our front lawn,” he explains.
“I've looked at survey data about this
question, and they ask young people, ‘Would you be more likely to go to insert
mainline church here, knowing that it is LGBTQ affirming, and the answer is
no,” Burge adds. “Very few young people
are even attracted by that. And there’s
a huge gap in the mainline, by the way, between what the clergy believes
politically and what the laity believes. The clergy is significantly more liberal than
the laity. I think that’s a real
structural problem,” he adds.
“I didn't have data on it when I was
writing the book. But that’s what I
would take the mainlines to task over. There’s
this huge disconnect between what the leadership wants the church to be and
what the laity wants the church to be. And
I think that the reactive nature of if they’re Right, we should be Left. It’s not the appropriate approach.”
Still, Burge argues that if Christians
and other religious groups don’t learn how to appreciate comprise and diverse
voices, America could become ungovernable.
“The way we’re cloistering ourselves off on the Left and the Right has
made it harder for us to govern ourselves. We should seek out ideologically diverse
spaces, we should be part of ideologically diverse spaces,” he tells CP. “American religion, whether it be Catholic,
Protestant, Mainline, Evangelical, those places used to be politically diverse,
and now, largely, they’re not anymore. And
I think that’s a problem. I think it’s a
problem when atheists drive out anyone who’s conservative. And I think it’s a problem when conservatives
drive out anyone who they see as liberal.”
In his book, Burge references the 1925
Scopes “Monkey” Trial, formally known as the State of Tennessee v. John Thomas
Scopes, to make a point against Evangelicals who try to make a significant
impact on the larger culture, having a history of it not ending well. The landmark legal case is about high school
teacher John Scopes, who was accused of violating Tennessee’s Butler Act. The law prohibited teaching human evolution in
state-funded schools, and the case became a national spectacle pitting modern
science against religious fundamentalism.
Burger highlighted how prominent Evangelical William Jennings Bryan, the
special prosecutor hired by the state, admitted that he believed the Earth
stood still as described in the book of Joshua to defend that the Bible is the
literal Word of God.
“Any time that evangelicals tried to
make a significant impact on the larger culture, it often resulted in ridicule,
mockery, and derision from mainstream society,” Burger writes.
The former pastor who now serves as a
professor of practice at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics
at Washington University in St. Louis says he’s worried “tribalism, division,
and strife” is a real threat to “the future of the American experiment” and
churches should be part of the solution to address those divides. “I am convinced that the biggest threat
facing the United States is not a foreign adversary like Russia or China. If the United States falls, it will be due to
infighting, not external attacks,” he adds.
“If we can survive the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil
War, the Great Depression, two world wars, the Civil Rights Movement, and 9/11,
but we are taken down by political and religious polarization, then we may not
be as good as we once were.”
Rev. Dr. Kenneth L. Beale, Jr.
Chaplain (Colonel-Ret), U.S. Army
Pastor, Ft. Snelling Memorial Chapel
