Over his lifetime, Burge has served as paid staff at three Baptist churches. Two have closed. The third is 80 percent smaller than when he was there two decades ago. Burge is no grim reaper of church closure. He happens to have presided over mainline Protestant churches during a period in which roughly 40 million Americans quit attending church. Those who did remain churchgoers over these years often veered toward more politically and culturally conservative faith communities.
It just so happens that Burge was also among those most equipped to analyze the erasure of America’s religious middle. The part-time pastor is also one of America’s preeminent religion number crunchers, a political scientist at the John C. Danforth Center at Washington University, St. Louis, and author of five books about religion (and irreligion) in the United States. His latest, The Vanishing Church, is about the hollowing out of moderate congregations.
In the 1950s, more than half of Americans were associated with mainline churches, also known as the “Seven Sisters” of mainline Protestantism: the United Methodist Church, Episcopal Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, Presbyterian Church (USA), United Church of Christ, American Baptist Church, and Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Burge describes what used to be a common scene: a thriving house of worship with factory workers taking communion right after lawyers and doctors; little kids sitting a row ahead of elders in their nineties; near-even odds of sitting next to a Republican or a Democrat.
Those who remain in these churches tend to be older. As Burge notes, since 2017 Episcopal priests have conducted more burials than baptisms. While a third of Presbyterian Church (USA) members are over 70 years of age, only 4 percent are children under 18. Time is not on the side of mainline churches.
There’s a danger in “over-romanticizing ‘moderate’ spaces in the past,” notes Brian Kaylor, a Baptist minister and co-author of Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism. In the middle of the last century, notes Kaylor, it was mainline clergy and politicians who pushed Christian nationalism (e.g., putting “God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, making “In God We Trust” the national motto, creating the National Prayer Breakfast). Evangelical churches may have filled thanks to a good deal of attrition from more staid mainline churches, but today’s Christian nationalists are “building on the theological and civic foundation laid by mainline tradition,” according to Kaylor.
Burge predicts a similar polarization may be coming for Catholics, as well.
American Catholicism has plenty of progressive touchstones, from Dorothy Day’s Catholic Workers movement to Cesar Chavez’s labor movement, which linked Catholic social teachings with justice work. For decades, the majority of nonwhite Catholics have registered as Democrats.
There is another sign of American Catholicism’s impending rightward tilt, and it’s coming from the pulpit. According to a survey administered by Catholic University of America that polled 10,000 priests, there has been a seismic shift in self-described theological views among priests over the past five decades. Among priests ordained between 1965 and 1969, only 16 percent considered themselves conservative (another 16 percent were “middle of the road,” and 68 percent were progressive). With each successive four-year cohort of priests, the rate of conservatism increased.
Catholicism has seen a steep decline in attendance since 1972, when nearly half of Catholics reported attending mass once a week or more. Today, Burge notes, there are more U.S. Catholics who never attend mass than who attend weekly or more often.
While mainline pews emptied, some denominations suffered a sort of identity crisis with attempted centrism that believers with stricter convictions often found frustrating.
Progress came at a cost. Over 7,000 congregations left the denomination as part of a (mostly) amicable separation that allowed churches to leave with their properties between 2019 and 2023. It is the largest denominational split since the Civil War.
There’s not much “middle” left.
While progressive Christians certainly do still exist in this country, their left-leaning political kin are far more likely to be religiously unaffiliated.
Depending upon the survey, between 25 percent and 35 percent of Americans consider themselves nonreligious (atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular”). One of the greatest predictors of a person also identifying as a religious “none” is political belief.
While it might be hard to find a left-leaning believer in many evangelical churches, Burge notes it may be even harder to find an atheist who voted for Trump or an agnostic who favors tighter abortion restrictions.
Not only have Americans’ religious views fractured along political lines, but the split has also corresponded with economic stratification. According to Burge’s research, and based upon General Social Survey data, in the 1970s there was no real difference in religious attendance of people at the top and bottom income brackets. By the 1980s, the bottom quarter of earners increasingly said they never attended services. By 2018, 35 percent of people in the bottom income bracket never attended church.
Burge tells a story about a Sunday morning at a Methodist church during his college years. During a part of the service when congregants voiced concerns and asked for prayers, a young man asked for prayers to help him get a job. He’d lost his job and was afraid he wouldn’t make rent. He’d come to church that morning with his girlfriend and their baby. At the end of the service, an older man dashed back to the man at the back of the sanctuary and offered him a job in his lumberyard, starting the next day.
The other side of income homogeneity at church is that it is less and less likely that many well-off, conservative evangelicals will come into contact with people less fortunate than themselves at their religious services. Such conservatives, who also often oppose social services that low-income families depend upon, are insulated in congregations where they rarely have to confront others with real needs just down the pew and part of their in-group faith community.
Kaylor agrees that the loss of middle spaces for Americans to meet across political and religious continuums is a serious problem that harms our civil society and our religious communities. But it’s hard to have real fellowship with people from different perspectives, backgrounds, and beliefs, Kaylor notes, when some “refuse to acknowledge the right of other voices or refuse to enter into good-faith dialogue.”
It’s just that today is not “good,” either, however much our siloed feedback loops reenforce that we are each, in our far corners, right.
If America could survive wars, the Great Depression, and 9/11, “but we are taken down by political and religious polarization,” Burge writes, “then we may not be as good as we once were.”
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