Where have all the Protestants gone?

USA Today: Where have all the Protestants gone? 

So-called mainliners led the fight for social causes such as civil rights, equality for women and other key issues of the day. Now that American society has embraced such norms, liberal Protestant groups have become marginalized. Or have they?

Since the first Protestants rowed to shore in Jamestown, Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, they've been in charge. As recently as the 1950s, the president as well as seven of the nine members of the Supreme Court were Protestant Christians. Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopal and other so-called mainline Protestant leaders called many of the shots on civil rights, school prayer, immigration, education and other key issues of the day. Then, in the late '60s, their numbers began to dwindle.

Today, only one member of the high court is Protestant (John Paul Stevens), and President Obama appears to have stopped attending church altogether at least outside of Camp David. Instead of dominating public debate, mainline Protestants find themselves struggling to reach a quorum. Half of their churches have fewer than a hundred members, and in nearly six of 10 congregations, it's the Church of the Blue Hair. Or No Hair. A quarter or more of their congregants are 65 or older. That's three times the number for their more conservative Evangelical cousins.

So what happened? How did America's most influential religious group become so marginal?

The conventional wisdom has been that the more conservative Catholic and Evangelical churches simply won over the hearts and minds of the American people. And, if there is a culture war, these more liberal Protestant groups surely must have lost.

But not so fast. Just look at what these mainline Protestants have championed: racial justice, equality for women, food stamps, rights for the disabled, reproductive choice and so forth. American law and society have embraced nearly every one of their issues down the line. We have largely become the inclusive, pluralistic society that these more liberal Protestant Christians envisioned.

But within the mainline Protestants' grand vision of the good society lie the seeds of their own institutional decline. By valuing the individual quest for faith, says the Rev. John Lindner in the fall issue of the Yale divinity journal Reflections, "Protestant practice has resulted in a drift toward the self-authentication of truth, suspicion of ecclesiastical authority and an outbreak of freelance spirituality, launching generations of seekers." Read steeple dropouts. This has helped fuel the increase in New Age movements as well as in the number of Americans who refer to themselves as "spiritual but not religious." Denominational labels and loyalty mean little to such people. …