America needs its lapsed Protestants back in church

Ross Douthat

Our intervention in Syria required me to be fully serious in my previous column, but now it’s time to return to this column’s ongoing series of implausible proposals. I am proposing that many secular liberal readers should head back to church.

But not by converting to my own religion, Roman Catholicism. Of course, that’s what I really want, what the sinister albino monk at my shoulder keeps muttering about, what the mimeographed orders from Catholic central command expect me to eventually achieve. (All those “disagreements” I keep having with Pope Francis are just classic papist trickery.)

For now, though, let’s talk about a smaller leap of faith. A large share of well-educated liberal America is post-Protestant — former Methodists, ex-Lutherans, lapsed Presbyterians, the secularized kids of Congregationalists.

Their ancestral churches, the theologically liberal mainline denominations, are aging and emptying, with the oldest churchgoing population and one of the lowest retention rates of any Christian tradition in the United States.

For the sake of their country, their culture and their very selves, liberal post-Protestants should find a mainline congregation and start attending every week.

One reason they don’t is that some of what those congregations offer is already embodied in liberal politics and culture.

As the sociologist N. J. Demerath argued in the 1990s, liberal churches have suffered institutional decline, but also enjoy a sort of cultural triumph, losing members even as their most distinctive commitments — ecumenical spirituality and a progressive social Gospel — permeate academia, the media, pop culture, the Democratic Party.

But this equilibrium may not last, and it may not deserve to. The campus experience of late suggests that liberal Protestantism without the Protestantism tends to gradually shed the liberalism as well, transforming into an illiberal cult of victimologies that burns heretics with vigor.

And the experience of American society suggests that religious impulses without institutions aren’t enough to bind communities and families, to hold atomization and despair at bay.

To remedy the last problem, the truly implausible version of this column would urge ex-Protestants to convert to Mormonism, the most demandingly communitarian of contemporary faiths.

But I won’t ask for that. Instead, I’ll just say: Liberals, give mainline Protestantism another chance.

A brief word to the really hardened atheists: Oh, come on. Sure, all that beauty and ecstasy and astonishing mathematical order is because we’re part of a multiverse or a simulation or something; that’s the ticket. Sure, consciousness and free will are illusions, but human rights and gender identities are totally real. Sure, your flying spaghetti monster joke makes you a lot smarter than Aquinas, Karl Barth, Martin Luther King. Sure.

Just go to church, guys. The mainline churches’ doors are open. They need you; America still needs them.

We’ll talk about the Church of Rome another time.