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The New Mainline
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13937 |
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BOOK WORLD
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2 / 1988 |
2,326 Words |
| Author
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George Weigel
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AMERICAN MAINLINE RELIGION
Its Changing Shape and Future
Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987
279 pp., $27 cloth, $10 paper
The very term mainline religion conveys a sense of stability--theological, cultural, demographic--that ill fits the evidence in Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney's important study of the ways in which American religion is getting sorted out at the end of the twentieth century. For if there could be one, admittedly vulgarized, but all-purpose summary of the Clark and Roof findings, it would be this: The old mainline, she ain't what she used to be.
By mainline religion, we unusually mean those great Protestant churches--Episcopal, Congregationalist (now United Church of Christ), Presbyterian, and Methodist--that for two hundred years or more took the basic task of culture-formation in the American democratic experiment as a matter of historically-validated divine right (although they would, latterly, never think of putting it that way). Now, as Roof and McKinney make empirically clear beyond all argument, the mainline--the churches with primary responsibility for the moral culture of the United States--has shifted in ways that portend a feisty future for American religion.
The authors begin by summarizing several of the most recent trends that illustrate the "depths of the changes now underway" on the American religious scene:
"The privileged Protestant mainline has fallen upon hard times and no longer enjoys the influence and power it once had.
"Conservative Protestants are flourishing and are now much more culture affirming than they used to be.
"Roman Catholic leadership has assumed a new position in the center and is articulating a social vision to its constituency and the public at large.
"American Jews seem to have experienced a shift in outlook--more concerned now with group interests and survival and less with assimilation.
"Black religionists are now holding a more inclusive vision of America and are less prone to a separatist outlook.
"Secular humanism is identified as a growing and hostile force in relation to traditional religion and morality."
These trends are incarnated demographically. In the great sorting out of American religious commitments, Protestants now have a 15 percent smaller "market share" than they had in 1952, and the "slippage" has been most pronounced among the churches of the old mainline. The Catholic market share has expanded in the same period by 12 percent, while Jews have declined from 4 to 2 percent of the population. Just as significantly, "other religions" have grown 300 percent (with 4 percent of the population now so identified), while those professing no religious preference have increased to 9 percent of the national population, up 350
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