Farewell to the American Protestant Majority
— Tuesday, October 9th, 2012 —
According to a new study by the Pew Forum, Protestants are, for the first time in history, not a majority in the United States of America. I don’t think that’s anything for evangelical Protestants, or anyone else, to panic about.
Several years ago, I pointed out here that studies were showing a declining Protestant majority, and projections were being made for this very reality. Now, the surveys says we have a 48 percent plurality of Protestants. I wasn’t frantic about that several years ago, and I’m still not.
When working toward our “God and country” badges, my childhood Boy Scout troop was shuttled over to the neighborhood United Methodist church for sessions with the pastor about being good Christians and good citizens. I remember my Southern Baptist sensibilities being shocked when the pastor said, in response to a question, that he didn’t believe in angels or demons. The reigning cultural presence of mainline Protestantism served the same purpose as the “God and country” badge. Give us enough Christianity to fight the communists and save the Republic, they said, but let’s remember not to take it all too seriously.
That culture is over.
Frankly, we should be more concerned about the loss of a Christian majority in the Protestant churches than about the loss of a Protestant majority in the United States. Most of the old-line Protestant denominations are captive to every theological fad that has blown through their divinity schools in the past thirty years-from crypto-Marxist liberation ideologies to sexual identity politics to a neo-pagan vision of God—complete with gender neutralized liturgies. Should we lament the fact that the Riverside Avenue Protestant establishment is now collapsing under the weight of its own bureaucracy?
What we should pay attention to instead may be the fresh wind of orthodox Christianity whistling through the leaves-especially throughout the third world, and in some unlikely places in North America, as well. Sometimes animists, Buddhists, and body-pierced Starbucks employees are more fertile ground for the gospel than the confirmed Episcopalian at the helm of the Rotary Club.
Accordingly, evangelicals will engage the culture much like the apostles did in the first century—not primarily to “baptized” pagans on someone’s church roll, but as those who are hearing something new for the first time. There may be fewer bureaucrats in denominational headquarters, but there might be more authentically Christian churches preaching an authentically Christian gospel.
We will be pained to see idolatries springing up where churches once were. In that we will have the same experience our brother Paul did two millennia ago in Athens (Acts 17:16). But like him, sometimes it is easier to gain a hearing among people who know they are ignorant (Acts 17:17), than with those who think they know. Paul listened to the pagan poetry about Zeus, and showed the Athenian philosophers how not even they could live with the kind of god-concepts they said they believed. Around us we hear the father-hunger in the hip-hop lyrics blaring down the urban sidewalk.
We see the fear of death in the plastic surgery clinics and health clubs springing up in the suburban strip-malls. We hear the despondency of sin lamented in the words of a country music song on the sound system of a rural gas station. Against all of that, we proclaim the only message that can answer these unconscious longings and these conscious resentments—Jesus and the resurrection (Acts 17:18). The pagans won’t always listen—but they will know that we are saying something new (Acts 17:32).
The American Protestant majority is is over and to that I say, “good riddance.” Now let’s pray for something new—like a global Christian majority, on earth as it is in heaven.
Some of this commentary was adapted from a post that originally appeared here on July 22, 2004.
25 Responses to “Farewell to the American Protestant Majority”
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To this post I say, “Amen.”
My first inclination is the fear for the future my children will see. Then I remember the sovereign Lord in Heaven sustains each breath we take.
My boys will face a more-hostile future, but one rife with gospel-opportunity. Let’s train up our children!
@Adam Ford,
I also have recently been thinking about the fact that my oldest child will be a senior in high school in ten short years. I also believe she will need a skill I have only read about — the skill of finding joy in being persecuted for her Christ.
It is beginning to consume me that my children (and the youth I work with at church) need this biblical skill. I am of course encouraged by Hebrews 12:3-4, “Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.” If I can point them to thinking about Christ, they will find all they will need, and will “count it all joy” (James 1:2). And if I read James correctly, their faith will be even stronger than mine by the time their persecution is finished! Thank you, God.
Maybe if our southern evangelicals decide to colonise Europe they will give up on destroying Unions which have a rich history even with Lech Walesa and the Catholic Church in Poland . Maybe they would have a second chance to mind their own business instead of starting a fight they cannot win - including David Miller who is 2nd Vice President of the SBC and becomes incensed with Labor Unions . Maybe it can be decided if Calvinism will be part of the curriculum or not so the monies from everyone can be appreciated . It would be a chance to “right” a lot of “wrongs” .
@Jack Wolford, I like Merle Haggard’s , ” You’re walkin on the fightin side of me ” right after Louis Armstrong’s , ” Saint James Infirmary” . The bitter & the sweet . Maybe this reply can get approved before I hear Louis and Mahalia Jackson on the same tape . How sweet it is .
From “The Church is Bigger than you Think,” by Patrick Johnstone:
“Christendom itself as an ideology is flawed and failing fast too. The rapid marginalization of the Judeo-Christian cultural heritage and also the failure of Christians to preserve their privileged position are patently obvious to the Western world. We are being compelled to return to a much more biblical and radical position — that of being a minority in the world but not of it. Few Christians are aware that the 1,700 years of a politicized Christianity as the ideology of the ruling elite are rapidly drawing to a close. Whether we like it or not, the concept of the imperial Church dominated the thinking of Roman Emperors from Constantine onwards through the papacy, the Reformation and the nineteenth century mission movement. Its marks are also visible in the largely Protestant Moral Majority or Religious Right in the USA and the efforts of Russian Orthodoxy to eliminate every alternative religious opinion today. The era of Constantinian Christendom is ending. A Church deprived of political power is freed from the burden of trying to use human power to dominate and influence the world. The time for a more effective mission to the needy world is dawning. We need to recognize this, adapt and seize the opportunities offered. Our reference point is not territorial or church growth aggrandisement, but building a kingdom that is not of this world, yet which will fill the earth as a contrasting alternative society. We need to return to the concept of a pilgrim Church, a Church that will be hated, rejected, despised, persecuted, yet be an incisive, decisive, victorious minority which, one day soon, will be ready for its Heavenly Bridegroom as the perfected Bride. The twenty-first century may be the time when the alternative Church becomes recognized as the real Church.
Christendom is doomed, but the future of biblical Christianity is bright. It is taking us a long time to perceive this. We need to stop mourning the decline of Christianity in Europe and many parts of the West, and realize that the coming of Christianity did not convert Europe, but ‘baptized’ the paganism that still has to be adequately confronted with the claims of Christ. The Europe of today has reverted to attitudes that prevailed in time of the early Church. Europe’s secularism, unashamed sinfulness, infatuation with neo-Hinduist New Age thinking and occultism needs to be confronted once more, as in the first centuries of the Church, by a Christianity unafraid to love and win those who persecute it.”
@David Rogers, Thanks for tracking back the Johnstone quote. And Russell thank you for this perspective. I am suddenly feeling more likely to stand and beat my chest than tear my shirt.
@David Rogers, I agree to an extent. I think Christianity needs to forget it’s egotistical, avaricious need for having the largest church or denomination. We need to concentrate on “Thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Furthermore we need to give up the idea the Bible is God’s inerrant Holy Word, and start reading it largely as an allegory wrapped in an enigma. There is much wisdom and great spiritual truths in the Bible, many of which have been obfuscated by those who insist on taking the entire collection literally.
Christendom is suffering from mans commandments being more important than Gods are. Consequently we are entering an era where there is more spiritual growth taking place outside organized religions than there is within. No religious affiliation is now being claimed by 20% of the population in the US, but 68% of the 20% consider themselves to be very spiritual. So why are so many who are truly seeking turning away from organized religion? People are seeking and religion is rejecting them, literally pushing them away, if they won’t conform to the prevailing man-made dogma.
@David Rogers,
One start will be for us all to understand the difference between religion, culture, and the body of Christ.
REMEMBER TIME IS ON THE SIDE OF TRUTH.
It doesnt matter how many man made constructs people try - the only one which will have dominion is the authorized authority - CHRIST.
You had me till the very end and then you lost me. Christianity is the religion of about 1/3 of the worlds population; why would you assume they would make up the majority in heaven.
@c k weaver,
Because according to this world-view the Christians will be not only a majority in heaven, but essentially the only ones there…
Well, that’ll preach.
“Frankly, we should be more concerned about the loss of a Christian majority in the Protestant churches than about the loss of a Protestant majority in the United States.”
Yes, and Amen!
“Frankly, we should be more concerned about the loss of a Christian majority in the Protestant churches than about the loss of a Protestant majority in the United States.”
Way too good of a quote. I absolutely agree. It blows my mind how historically-ignorant Christians are when it comes to thinking about our increasingly pagan, and post-Christian context. We’ve been here before!! It’s difficult in some ways, but the Gospel is bigger and stronger than the culture! The Gospel is the power of God unto salvation for all who believe. That’s something to bank on. And when less people “know what the Bible says” because they grew up with it, you can actually teach what it says and it’ll sound like good news!
Thanks for the post, Dr. Moore.
Unfortunately, the SBC was a “Christendom” for too long a time, in the American South anyway. This is why the movement has 16m members - only 6m of whom are in church on any given Sunday. The Augean stables which need cleaning out are closer than we realise.
A better example is the *context* of Jeremiah 29. The exiles’ situation in Babylon is our situation in the West, and especially in the UK (which is where I am writing from). But don’t scorn us: you guys are next.