Thursday, May 11, 2023
PMT: Evangelical Fade-Out
Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that the Southern Baptist denomination lost about 1.5 million members since 2018, and 3 million since 2006. To put it in context, there are about 1.5 million Episcopalians in the United States, total.
The denomination seems poised to make it worse, too. They are about to take up a proposal that would bar women from all pastoral positions, not just senior minister posts. (Of course, that is already and always has been the position of the Catholic church, and it's not working out so well for them, either).
Mainline churches for several decades were shrinking while evangelical churches like the Southern Baptists grew. Now, the decline is becoming apparent across the board.
I see this in many of the friends around me-- church just isn't relevant or important to them. The churches they used to go to have doubled down on their various orthodoxies, meanwhile. It's a fraying of the social fabric that builds on so many others.
This drift from faith has affected our politics, too. As people become unmoored from institutions like churches, fraternal organizations, and other formal social groups, they become less invested in the success of the society, and more prone to extremism. Those who think that fewer evangelicals will be good for politics might be surprise-- the former evangelicals are likely to be even worse.
