Why Protestantism Is Collapsing in America: Nathan and Cameron on Church Decline

Cameron (00:01)

Hello and welcome to Thinking Out Loud. I'm your co-host, Cameron McAllister.

Nathan (00:05)

And I'm your cohost, Nathan Rittenhouse.

In this episode, we discuss an article that suggests that liberal Protestantism and evangelicalism are declining because of their success. Now that sounds like a bit of a paradox there, but I think as you listen to this conversation, it will make sense of some things for you, but it also might work ⁓ as a probiotic against some things that might be going on in your own heart and in your own congregation. So think along through this one with us. We're pushing at the boundaries of some changes that we see happening in ⁓ spiritual and religious culture.

and looking forward to having you think along with us on this one. If you enjoy this type of content, like it, share it, subscribe to it. And if you want to support the work that we do or find out more about what we're up to, you can do so by visiting www.toltogether.com

Cameron (00:08)

Secular Protestantism is America's religion. That is the provocative title of an article that appeared in mere orthodoxy a few weeks ago by Daniel Hummel. And I think it's worth discussing. I read it and I immediately thought of Nathan. That's right. I read about secular Protestantism and Nathan came to mind. ⁓

Nathan (00:26)

I am the embodiment

of all things secular and Protestant.

Cameron (00:32)

Yes.

Actually, what I call Nathan now affectionately is the Wendell Berry of West Virginia. I don't know how he feels about that.

Nathan (00:40)

Hey, you know, actually, I

had a mind-altering experience this morning. When I talked to you earlier today, you said that you would see me online in Two Shakes of a Lamb's Tail, which was a oddly agricultural reference for you, for a time reference, Cameron. So maybe I'm having some impact on your life. I don't know.

Cameron (00:59)

I'm here to shatter your illusion. That is also a quote from Pulp Fiction. So there you go.

Nathan (01:05)

And because I'm not secular

Protestant enough, I don't know.

Cameron (01:10)

Quentin Tarantino. So agricultural metaphors by way of Quentin Tarantino. All right, onto business here. Yes. So Daniel Hummel makes the case in this article that mainline Protestantism and evangelicalism, so both are in steep decline right now, if you didn't know. And that is, yes, by the numbers, very easy to demonstrate that. There are a number of different sociological studies. The best book on this subject that

Nathan (01:12)

and Anyway, alright, focus, focus—by the numbers.

Cameron (01:40)

gathers together all of this data is Christian Smith's Why Religion Became Obsolete, which I have and I'm working my way through. I'm reading too many books at once right now, but that's a valuable

Nathan (01:52)

Maybe overstates the case a bit,

but it's a provocative thesis.

Cameron (01:56)

Yes. So, I mean, I always, it's worth saying here, one qualification I throw in here is that sociology is a very powerful tool, but don't see it as more than a tool. Don't blow it up into an entire worldview or something like that. think Christian Smith would say the same thing. So he's going to analyze a lot of ⁓ data. He's going to use a lot of surveys and a of numbers, and you will get from that a partial picture of a cultural mood. It's not going to be everything, but it's really helpful and it can give you some valuable insights. let's, yeah. So end of qualification there.

But it's in, Protestantism is in decline in North America right now. So Daniel Hummel in this article argues that both mainline Protestants and evangelicals are victims of their own success.

Nathan (02:40)

Tell me more.

Cameron (02:42)

I'll tell you more here in a second, but here's what he's not saying. So they are not, it's not that there are cultural forces arrayed against them. There are some, that's true. In the case of evangelicals, it's not marginalization and persecution. It is that their message to a certain extent has really succeeded and really taken root.

But there are some unintended consequences that have come along with that. So let me spell that out real quickly and then kick it over to Nathan what that means for both of them. For the liberal Protestant churches, the mainline churches, it's also important to point out, I should have done this at the start, that at one point Protestantism was a cultural force to be reckoned with in America. It really was. mean, these were people who were not only influential, they were,

influenced decisions that were being made. They just exercised huge sway in American culture, and that's slowly been declining and now precipitously declining in recent years. So what happened? So he says that the mainline churches, basic message was, he calls this, I believe, the cultural value set. Their message was, and remember, they're pitted against the fundamentalists. So this is mainly taking place in the early 1900s, 1920s, thereabouts.

One of the the pivotal figures who was kind of holding it together at one point was Dwight Moody. So when D.L. Moody died, that he was this kind of unifying figure and a lot of the bridges that were built collapsed and you had this tension that then erupted into a all out kind of war. So the main line values, that value set were tolerance, open-mindedness, intellectual hospitality and generosity. And by and large, this message was successfully disseminated and it became deeply culturally embedded. And because of that, the churches that had made this their main message became, their theological distinctives became less and less distinct and the.

Church became virtually indistinguishable from a glorified kind of country club. And so people stopped going to church. They cherished those values and they had internalized those values, but there was no reason to go to these churches anymore. So a victim of their own success. Evangelicalism, on a different note, evangelicalism really, the message of evangelicalism that really caught on was that Christianity is not a religion.

I've actually heard this, I have a story about this that I think I've shared it here before, but it perfectly illustrates it. Yeah. So once this will illustrate it. So I used to work at a grocery store when I was in my college years and somebody came through my line and for some reason or another, this was, I was just that kind of cashier, Christianity and religion came up and this person said, interesting. So Christianity, that's that's a religion, right? And the person in line behind her was ready.

Nathan (06:31)

yeah, you have it. Tell it again. Yeah.

Cameron (06:58)

for that question. And before I could answer, said, nope, it's not a religion, it's a relationship. It's a relationship with your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. It's a personal relationship. And just big smile. So that message was incredibly powerful. And it is incredibly powerful. And it caught on in a huge way. And he points out, now Daniel Hummel in the article is fair here, and he says, now, did evangelicals intend for this to be interpreted as

It's a purely personal relationship with Jesus. You don't necessarily need to have any institutional affiliations or church connections or accountability whatsoever. What matters is Jesus coming into your heart. It's your personal relationship. Nobody ever said that, but that is here law of unintended consequences. That is what happened. And so to a significant extent,

We now have as offshoots of that, we've got people who would be the nuns who identify as no religious affiliation whatsoever, or we would have people who would say, well, I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious. Or you would have the Christians who, yeah, I love Jesus, but I can't stand Christians or being around them. Or it's just, it's hard to be around Christians. And so I listen to podcasts and I watch the odd sermon every now and then. Maybe I go to church on Easter and Christmas, but I don't feel any need to be a part of a church.

I don't need to do that. It's about a personal relationship with Jesus. So that's another case in point of being a victim of your own success. Nathan.

Nathan (08:24)

Mm-hmm.

Let me add one more category. Yeah. One more category that isn't part of this is that there are for, okay, this is total Nathan guessing, but for every one person that you hear about deconstructing, I bet there are, I don't know, I'm just making up a number four or five who are no longer part of the church who just got busy. Church wasn't important. Kids sports, a couple of vacations, some business conferences, and just faded out.

Cameron (08:36)

Thoughts, my friend.

Nathan (09:05)

because they didn't see a reason to have a need to really be there. ⁓ So is that sense in which you can do this personally without a... I guess there's almost a sense baked in there that once you understand this set of principles, that's all you need.

And so you show up and you get it and you go, it's like a drive-through window at a, you know,

Cameron (09:42)

One is the loneliest of-

Bad jokes.

Nathan (09:53)

It's like a drive-through window at pick your fast food place. You show up, you get the thing and you leave. And that pretty much is the end of it. And so all of those components are at play here. And I think in a broader sense in the way in which we think about spiritual life, vitality and church in general. ⁓ Before we move on from that though, can you...

Cameron (10:05)

Mm-hmm.

Nathan (10:19)

help me here because, and I think our listeners, because by and large, I hear almost everybody referred to as Protestant who isn't Catholic or Orthodox. And that might be a throwback to what you're saying about the massive cultural force that Protestantism was, is I think even if you stopped in at your local non-denominational evangelical church and asked them, I think they would say they're Protestant. Are they Protestant? Can you define Protestant?

What are some of the distinguishing factors here of how would we separate out liberal Protestantism from evangelicalism? What's a technical, I'm sure there's a technical definition we can give here, but then the practical way in which these terms have been used is pretty slippery to meet out ⁓ a distinctive connotation of them.

Cameron (11:12)

Yeah, I mean, in here, again, you encounter some of the limitations of sociological categories and research because according to these surveys, people, the nuns, both the nuns and spiritual and not religious are being classed as Protestant. So that's an, and I'm not sure entirely what goes into the thinking there, but I know that the basic way of distinguishing them is denominationally. So Lutheran.

Nathan (11:38)

Mm-hmm.

Cameron (11:40)

It would basically be, you would spell that out along denominational lines. And that's the basic dividing line between these, yeah, that would distinguish Protestant churches. So it would just be those denominations that fall within the Reformed or Protestant sector.

Nathan (12:01)

Yeah. I'm saying, I don't think most people know that, though.

Cameron (12:06)

No, it's again, yeah, it's a broad category. Well, Protestantism itself is, mean, that's a, if you're one of the critiques against Protestantism, of course from Catholics would be just what a massive collection and what a factious collection of denominations it actually represents, right? It's not, if you say Protestantism, you're not describing a unified whole.

not in the same sense that you are when you talk about Catholicism. And so you have to deal with that,

Nathan (12:39)

Okay,

but maybe in that is part of this idea that its success has led to its disillusion, in the sense that if you have some categories that are so broad and ill-defined that anything fits within them, then it does allow... I mean, so this is a critique that even Protestants have of Protestantism, is that it does help an unhealthy Enlightenment individualism flourish to the point that you have no real... I mean, so everybody...

Cameron (13:06)

Absolutely.

Nathan (13:09)

sees this critique, I think at some intellectual or experiential level.

Cameron (13:15)

Well, if you thought about it at all, you see this critique very quickly and that's the thread running for both of those, both the mainline and the evangelical arguments that Daniel Hummel is making. It's a form of individualism in both cases. One is kind of secular enlightenment individual, individualism values. And the other is a form of kind of spiritual individualism that let's face it is foreign to a biblical anthropology and ecclesiology, but

held huge cultural, has held and holds huge cultural sway.

Nathan (13:48)

Let's just say what you said there again to make sure we understand this distinction. That when I think of liberal Protestantism, ⁓ probably a pretty low view of the authenticity and authority of scripture. Neat stuff, handy, morally to some degree. We can kind of pick and choose what we want out of that. Certainly there wouldn't be a literal heaven and hell, not ⁓ a literal return of Christ. There wouldn't be a need for missions. ⁓ Most of the social outworkings of that would align pretty neatly with

some political party. ⁓ Okay, the Democrats at this point. ⁓ And then, which is different from the evangelicalism, which would still have a high view of Scripture, high view of missions, ⁓ high social action.

Cameron (14:32)

So evangelicalism, this is an important distinction. So the evangelicalism would also affirm all of those, the miracles, the virgin birth, a literal physical resurrection of Jesus. Yes, creedal Christianity, yes. You have that, but then you have this. And again, I said law of unintended consequences because, and Daniel Hummel stresses that too in the article.

Nathan (14:44)

Classic Orthodox Christianity to some degree. Credal, anyway.

Cameron (15:02)

When people talk about having a personal relationship with Jesus, this was not meant to be read in the way that it has been sometimes. mean, another absurd outworking of it that you can, yeah, that you can, if somebody says something along the lines of, and this people do say this, I believe Jesus is Lord, but that's just my personal opinion. You can only make a statement like that, yeah, which is predicated on a profound misunderstanding of what it means for Jesus to be Lord.

Nathan (15:12)

Well, I'll...

Yeah.

Cameron (15:33)

But people do make statements like that because everything that happens, wherever it happens, whether we're talking about Saudi Arabia or Atlanta, Georgia or West Virginia or Geneva, it happens in a cultural context. And the cultural context plays a role, doesn't completely determine, but plays a role in how something is heard. So you say Christianity is, it's about a personal relationship, it's not a religion.

personal relationship with your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. You say that in America, the land of expressive individualism, there's a pretty good chance that people are going to run with it in a very individualistic way. So I want to say that, I say that with compassion. not trying to heap, you know, scorn on anybody here. And I think also, again, evangelicals are very motivated by activism. We want to get as many people to, you know,

Nathan (16:14)

Mm-hmm.

Cameron (16:29)

sign on to our cause as we can and we want quick decisions. Do you though? So yeah.

Nathan (16:35)

Well, you want to know a hilarious place?

You want to know hilarious mashup of these? ⁓ so we did a previous podcast on ortho bros. It's interesting to talk to people who like, well, I've just decided that this is the true church. That sentence is hilarious. Like that is the most American way to join something like I have validated the authority of this thing. Therefore, ⁓ anyway, that's a whole different, but, ⁓

Cameron (16:49)

yeah yeah yep

If you want a striking contrast, think about C.S. Lewis's famous lines from Surprise by Joy where he basically, I mean, I'll butcher it, but came kicking and screaming, perhaps the most reluctant convert in all of England. So that's a man who's not persuaded because he wants anything to be true. It's because he thinks, no, this is true. And the truth, yeah.

Nathan (17:14)

Mm-hmm.

Let me, let me, let

me throw out a line here. So this is, this is a grandpa written house quote. Um, and this is maybe why I sit in an interesting spot to look at this. I, I'm, you grew up in a very similar context to this too, um, with your family, Cameron, but so one of the lines that my grandpa would frequently use is to say that your salvation is personal, but it isn't individualistic. And we tend to assume that those two things are the same. You do it is intended.

biblically speaking and the gift of the Holy Spirit that you would have a personal relationship with God. are not punching down on that. That is there. But it is, but the same Bible that teaches us that also is very clear that that is a collective communal plural you implications.

Cameron (17:57)

Yes.

Amen. Yeah.

Nathan (18:13)

There's no way around. I mean, I don't know how you would read the Bible other than that. And so, both of those things are very much true at the same time. ⁓ And, if it is personal, but it's not individualistic, A. I don't know anybody who got saved and then, in next three weeks, became a perfect theologian, perfectly sanctified, and perfect. And they had it all.

Right then, like that. I mean, you're as saved as you're ever going to be, but there's a lot more that God has intended for you in that process of even your own relationship with God, much less the entirety, the implications of that and all of the relationships that you have in all of the categories of your life. And so it seems like it's a wildly misunderstood concept there to think that this is something that I can do on my own, that I've got it all, I don't need any more, and a couple YouTube videos and I'll be good.

Cameron (18:57)

Well, we've seen...

Well, we've seen the pitfalls of this a little bit and you and Lindsay talked about this a couple of weeks ago where you talked about people who have some sort of a platform become Christians and then suddenly they're spokesmen for the faith and the dangers of that. don't do that. it's not, and it's not a reason. Yeah. So I was just going to say, it's not a recent development. It's in scripture. So there you go. But I also think back to not too long ago, you, know, Joshua Harris,

Nathan (19:24)

It's in scripture of like, don't let a recent convert become a It's right there.

you

Cameron (19:39)

who wrote, kiss dating goodbye. We look back on that now and here's where I'm gonna sound a little bit less compassionate. We should have known better. Come on, he was 19 years old. A 19 year old kid is going to be somehow an expert on relationships. I what do you know when you're 19? I I think about when I was 19. I'm terrified to say what I thought I knew. I'm so grateful. Thank God I didn't have a book deal.

My goodness, but the people who empower this should have known better. That's an incredibly unwise decision. It might've been an effective decision from a PR standpoint or something. Hey, we're going to sell a lot of books. Hey, they did. It was a best seller. Or we have this person who was formerly, I don't know, just take your pick. This person was a a witch on social media, on TikTok. This was a TikTok witch.

Now suddenly they're Christian and they have 2 million followers. So why not leverage that? I can tell you, I can come up with so many reasons not to leverage that, but it'll work in this way. Yeah. It'll work in a certain sense and do certain things, but it will work against you actively in other ways. You have to think, we've got to think more deeply about this and not immediately just snap into action on everything. I think this is a sort of a lesson of not just immediately taking something and just

running with it, being slower to action.

Nathan (21:08)

Does the article offer, yeah, does

the, and maybe that's the answer, but does the article then offer.

corrective choices that we can be making within our households and within our community. I was just like, well, this happened. I didn't think, yeah.

Cameron (21:20)

No. That's why I want to be a sociologist of religion, Nathan, because I've seen several different sociologists interviewed and then when they say, so do you have any constructive proposals? No, no, I'm just a sociologist. I've seen James Davidson Hunter say this. I've seen Christian Smith say this. I mean, they're being humble, but also, hey, that must be nice to sit there and just say, everything's broken. yeah, that house is, nope, nope, but it is on fire and it's getting worse. That floor is about to collapse.

Nathan (21:35)

Yeah That house is on fire. Are you a firefighter? Nope, nope, but that house is on fire, so.

Cameron (21:55)

That must be nice. Just be a, know, just sort of, it's the academic version of a guy walking down the street with a sign that says the end is not repent. I don't know. That's not, yeah.

Nathan (22:05)

But given that we don't have that luxury, you not... Well, there's a sense in which academics is always lagging culture to some degree. And I wonder if...

Cameron (22:10)

No, we don't.

What do do? Nathan, help us. Just kidding.

Nathan (22:28)

I wonder if we are on the edge of a resurgence back in the other direction here in a helpful sense because to say that religion is is dead or has died out does not Anecdotally feel true. ⁓ I think we have to be very careful in stewarding that resurgence though because a lot of that is a lightly baked political philosophy for sure

Cameron (22:48)

Right. Yeah.

Nathan (22:57)

But there is a real hunger and a thirst, I think, for something uniquely different. And if we're going to do something uniquely different than as Christians, we're going to have to learn from what were the fail... So, I mean, let's look at the failures of the past and say, what did those churches not do well? And you know what one of the big ones is? You know what one of the churches that didn't struggle during that time? Pentecostalism.

Or churches that had a high view of the spiritual realities of the spiritual realm that spoke far beyond materialism because it is a Western value to smash everything into reductionary reductionistic material pieces. And then you don't need a church to live in that world. And so there is a sense in which we will have to speak more clearly about spiritual realities as an alternative to.

Cameron (23:51)

Hmm.

Nathan (23:52)

all the dysfunction that we see having tried to live within an imminent frame of a pure materialism. So I don't think the game is lost here, but it will. It will necessitate that Christian Lee, we militate against what has been considered normal as enlightenment values that we've then tried to in a market driven, capitalistic economic vision, impose onto church structures. In order to see them succeed.

Cameron (24:23)

Yes. And the reason I brought it up was not to spread doom and gloom there, but to say, hey, here are some sobering realities from mistakes in the recent past and we can learn from them. So I think there is a constructive element here. And I'm with you, Nathan. I felt the same way reading Christian Smith's book. I thought, I am going to take this with a grain of salt. There is a lot of helpful information and data in here and it is helping to paint.

picture of the cultural mood. And those are Christian Smith's words as well. But it is far from the entire story. And anecdotally, my experience is the same as yours, Nathan. Not only am I seeing a pronounced spiritual hunger, but that spiritual hunger is for really robust expressions. Not wiccan apps on the phone, but for something that's real and stable.

Nathan (25:19)

Mm-hmm.

Cameron (25:21)

Something that would lead somebody to join, yes, an Orthodox church or a Catholic church or an Anglican church or a Pentecostal church. But I think you're also very right to call attention to, so that was, and that's something I should have named yet. So Pentecostalism has been fine through all of this and is alive and well and thriving all around the world. And the recognition of spiritual realities is so crucial. And it's something that we're often

It's, mean, it's absent from the article I mentioned. Now necessarily. So, I mean, I'm not going to, I'm not going to hold him. He was, he's writing a sociological argument article, but it's true. So much of even, you know, the discussions that I've been involved with Nathan with people, you know, in my denomination, you know, let's face it, Presbyterians are not especially known for being very spiritual astute about the spiritual battles that we face. mean, we can be. Yeah. Yeah, right.

Nathan (25:53)

You

Happy Clappy. just, I'll get you the t-shirt Cameron.

Cameron (26:20)

But that's incredibly important. it's something that also, I mean, there's just a, there's a growing interest in all things spiritual once again, which is not surprising. You have this prolonged period of kind of where people feel a sense of emptiness and disillusionment. And so we are spiritual creatures. So very unsurprisingly, we're turning once again to spiritual tools to try to

re-enchant the world. That's, it makes perfect sense that that's happening. So we need to be prepared for that and we need to be able to talk about that with a straight face, as though it's real, without blushing. I find that it's, yeah.

Nathan (27:04)

This ⁓ will sound like a weird question, does your church take itself seriously as a spiritual entity?

Because I think those are the churches that won't be replaced by the Lions Club.

So it's one of the things that I frequently think about of what are the things, like there are lots of good things that your church could be doing, but what are the things that your church can uniquely do that no other, that a non-Christian organization couldn't?

And so that doesn't mean that you don't give money to the food bank or the backpack program for you back to school. But it might be that you want to reevaluate some of the priorities there. ⁓

as an initial starting point for, yeah, which comes first? I think if you have a church that prioritizes the spiritual and allows the material outworkings to flow from that, that has eternal staying power where a church that emphasizes the material outworkings with a spiritual tag on will very quickly reduce itself just to the material outworkings. That's a church that's easy to walk away from. So there is a real, cart ahead of the horse sort of situation here from creation, spirit speaks matter into existence and a church that operates in the reverse of that ontological priority isn't going to have the same power necessary to meet the spiritual hungers of the world around

Cameron (28:43)

does your church take itself seriously as a spiritual entity? That's not a question you should answer quickly. That's one that you should chew on for a little bit. Ruminate, another agricultural reference for you, Nathan. Well, we trust this has been helpful to you. if you're not, and nobody's telling me to do this, nobody's paying me to do this, but if you're not a regular reader of mere orthodoxy,

Nathan (28:54)

Ruminate. Look at you go.

Cameron (29:14)

It really should be on your list. You should go to Mere Orthodoxy. It's a great magazine and really good people behind that magazine. Really fantastic articles and analysis. Nathan and I, if you have listened to us for long enough, you'll notice that we quote from it frequently. It's a helpful publication out there. This is a time where a lot of publications are embattled and need help and support and they're definitely worth your time. know Nathan and I find them helpful.

You've been listening to Thinking Out Loud, a podcast where we think out loud about current events and Christian hope.