Do you have comparable data that isolates the clergy in the mainline? I'd be very curious to see how that compares to what you describe in this post as the average person in the pew.
Generally, Mainline clergy are much more liberal than the average Mainline member. So, if we are judging the Mainlines by their leadership, it is absolutely fine and accurate to call the Mainlines politically liberal.
Also, Ryan Burge surely knows that the Mainlines are indeed *theologically* liberal. Not teasing out the distinction between political liberalism and theological liberalism is a real disservice to the layman who reads the article and makes the title a real misnomer.
I'm a cradle Episcopalian, was a member of an ELCA Lutheran church for many years, and now attending a non denominational Evangelical church. Here's what I see: in the Episcopal and Lutheran churches, the clergy is way way way to the left of the congregation. I got tired of hearing Democratic talking points in every sermon. If I wanted to hear rehashes if NPR, I could stay home. At the Evangelical church, I hate the music and the ugly building, but I get true spiritual nourishment from the sermon. And I find much more sophisticated theology than I did at the mainline churches
What I find interesting is that is almost a mirror opposite of my story; I left evangelical churches and am a now a UMC pastor because it was made clear to me that any deviation from Republican politics would not be accepted. The mainline is really very "purple", so it's not that it's all liberal, but it is that liberals aren't simply pushed out as a normal routine.
I am an Episcopal clergy person, desperately trying to get my colleagues to preach the Gospel instead of liberal politics. For the most part, it falls on deaf ears.
What makes me most sad and frustrated is that they literally do not see the difference. So many of us have decided that liberal politics *is* the Gospel, which I consider blasphemous.
God is so far above the ways we find to divide ourselves from one another.
Some would accuse me of being one of these clergy people preaching "liberal politics."
What I have found since January is that the Gospel is under attack from the highest office in my country, so somehow defending/preaching the Gospel is now labelled as being partisan.
Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, even when it's really hard, and we really don't want to.
'those people' are our neighbors. I think we need to love them, even if it means turning the other cheek. Even if it means seeing beyond the entrenched differences between us. Even if it means turning the other cheek.
I don't find loving my neighbor and turning the other cheek incompatible with standing against injustice and protecting the vulnerable. In fact, they are necessary to doing so.
I find it interesting that you feel that Lutheran and Episcopal churches are so partisan when their membership shows healthy representation from both sides. Compare that to a typical nondenominational church which is overwhelmingly republican.
Genuinely curious about what kind of sophisticated theology you’re hearing at the non-denominational Evangelical church. Also curious about its size. Thanks.
Maybe the evangelical church i go to is exceptional. It is Crossroads Church in Staten Island NY and you are welcome to visit it.
The attendance is about 400 a week, divided over 3 services.
As for the theology and the sermons: during Lent, for example, we had a series on the 7 sayings of Christ on the cross, each about 45 minutes long. Lots of indepth analysis of the words, Greek and Hebrew, the role of sacrifice in the OT, was the Trinity actually broken for the time when when Jesus was on the cross, ("why have you forsaken me?") Etc. Etc. It went deep, and was very Biblical and very moving.
I mean that's generally been my experience of non-denominational Evangelical preaching - so I was curious what she was referring to. Sophisticated theology is not generally commercially viable/desirable, which tends to be paramount at these places.
To be honest, I'm a bit surprised about the “more sophisticated theology” part. Can you expand on that?
I'm super curious because I usually attend ELCA Lutheran and Episcopal churches, but just yesterday, I went to a non-denominational charismatic church just to see what it was like.
Most Episcopal and Lutheran sermons I've heard—and for that matter, Catholic homilies—get into the theology quite a bit, helping the audience understand the historical context and theological significance of that week's scripture readings. As one example, I've found that it's very common for the pastor to mention something about the original Greek (or Hebrew) and what the specific meaning of certain key terms is / what gets lost in English translation / different perspectives on how we might interpret it. Which is to say, the focus is on making meaning from scripture.
By contrast, the charismatic church that I went to seemed to do the opposite, giving a sermon with a message and then quoting a bunch of out-of-context sentences from different parts of the Bible as supporting evidence. I think it's great to examine how certain themes are expressed throughout the Bible—but doing so in a way that respects the different contexts, genres, and functions of different parts of scripture. I'm concerned that approaches like that of this church leave a wide open door that could be used to push any desired message and then cherry-pick some sentences that seem to support it. I also worry that it gives churchgoers an overly simplistic impression of the Bible. (In this church's case, I think the sermon was perfectly theologically sound; it's just the approach that concerns me.)
Anyway, those are just my experiences :) I'm really curious about yours!
I've been an evangelical for ~20 years, though have never visited a charismatic church.
I guess I would say my experience of non-denoms has been what you might call churches more in the Tim Keller or R.C. Sproul mode. College-educated, Reformed emphasis but credobaptist. In their expository preaching, discussing the Greek/Hebrew is a common theme. As is citing observations from theologians over the centuries related to the passage at hand. To me, being influenced by Reformed thinking at all means staking down very specific positions on some difficult questions and then relentlessly testing them against Scripture.
I grew up largely in a few Mainline churches (though I was never exposed much to ELCA due to living in the South, but had some exposure to TEC), and I suppose my sense of Mainline theology at that time was that it was like pinning down Jello. The pastor would speak on whatever theme he or she felt like that were at most loosely related to the Scripture readings of the day. Most of them weren't very good preachers and the sermons tended to turn into rambles that ultimately produced an observation about life. But not a lot of specific claims about God's nature or man's proper relation to God, not much that was specifically Christian as opposed to some vague general monotheism.
I would say that as a child, I was never really exposed to the Gospel per se or taught what the big deal was about Jesus. I felt he was just a character in the Bible, the "Son of God", whatever that means. I also remember having a general feeling from a very young age that no one at these churches really believed in God, except my mother (who was raised Baptist).
I've come to assume the squishiness of this theology is because of the "big tent" nature of Mainline churches, and the fact the pastor is probably far to the (theological) left of the elderly congregation, and so doesn't want to say anything to offend them.
Yes, we observe communion every service at my current church. That was important to me.
I think the old school SBC norm is probably once per month communion. I think a lot of megachurches might be this way too, though I’m not entirely sure where the demarcation lines are between 1/week and 1/month Baptists. But I again suspect it is Reformed influence driving 1/week.
My in-laws go to a 1/month SBC church and I know the younger/lead pastor makes Reformed doctrines much more central to his sermonizing and he has lobbied for 1/week. But I think some of the old-time elders and the old pastor (who serves as a sort of a pastor emeritus) have held their ground on 1/month up to this point for some reason.
As a practical note, there are other Anglican churches (such as ACNA or Continuing Anglican) in the States that may be more up your alley. If you have a high churchmanship, Orthodox or (some) Catholic parishes might be a good fit as well.
Fellow Episcopalian here -- and *totally* get what you're saying.
The leadership of TEC is radically more leftist than the folks in the pews. But the denomination is a death spiral and won't get better (if it does) until it's figuratively razed to the ground -- and boy is that coming fast.
Thank you for this post—lots of interesting stuff!
1. I'm a bit confused how the stats on “here’s how the mainline differs from all white Democrats on these questions” then leads to the conclusion that “If the measuring stick is comparing the average mainline Protestant to the average Democrat, then they are clearly right of center.” The measuring stick that was just used wasn't the average Democrat, it was the average *white* Democrat; those are two very different things. What do the numbers look like when comparing the average mainline Democrat to the average Democrat (of any race)?
2. I think it's important to note that the specific political issues that were mentioned here were all social issues. What about economic issues? Foreign policy? Environment? Or even social issues other than these (e.g. immigration, same-sex marriage, gender roles at home, drug laws)? We might end up with a more nuanced picture. Perhaps that's a good subject for a future post 🙂
3. The end of the post says that picturing the average mainline Protestant means picturing someone who voted for Trump. I don't entirely disagree, but I think that's a potentially misleading/overly reductive way to represent the statistics. Something like “out of 5, 3 voted for Tump and 2 for Harris” gives a much more accurate picture that captures the diversity of viewpoints.
Generally, when people refer to the mainline as ‘liberal’, they usually mean to call it theologically ‘liberal’, which is taken to refer to the rejection traditional Christian doctrine and/or praxis, usually with regard to certain ‘hot-button’ topics such as homosexuality or women’s ordination, but occasionally also with regard to creedal dogma. Much of the mainline is ‘liberal’ in this sense, inasmuch as their synods/governing bodies have formally adopted such things. I don’t think partisanship is usually in mind here.
I think you are right. I never interpreted mainline liberal Protestantism as politically liberal or more aligned with Democrats. Indeed, Mainline Protestants were traditionally part of the affluent country club wing of the Republican Party, in NY known as Rockefeller Republicans.
The liberal referred to their theological beliefs not their partisan secular politics.
AFAICT the denominations that reject foundational doctrines like the Trinity are if anything more politically conservative on average (Oneness Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons of course). The only really heterodox liberal group, the Unitarians, has left Christianity entirely.
Liberal theology, properly speaking (and as distinguished from, e.g. Neo-Orthodoxy), also generally rejects the Trinity. Regarding the Episcopal Church see John Shelby Spong for example, who more or less rejected every historical Christian doctrine while remaining a bishop in good standing.
But I do think you make a valid point about the groups you name. But I also think they tend towards being highly theologically conservative WITHIN the context of their own tradition, even if their views would be seen as radical to most other Christians.
I keep coming back to the thought that the main thing that distinguishes the Mainlines is a diversity of opinions, with no clear requirements for what a member of the clergy must believe. So in practice, they believe everything from historic Christian doctrines, to Neo-Orthodoxy, to radical 20th and 21st century theological ideas, to even, occasionally, open atheism.
There are groups that are conservative-coded while believing more radical things, at least on the surface, than the median Mainliner in relation to traditional Christian doctrines, but they generally insist on some level of conformity to the radical doctrines in question.
This is generally what defines theological conservativism across traditions, even extending into Islam: a firm belief in the importance of orthodoxy per se, with eternal consequences for getting it wrong beyond a certain point (as to what that exact point is: that will depend to some degree on the tradition).
The Episcopal Church, for quite some time, was also extraordinarily (if not officially) heterodox. I have heard that it is slightly better nowadays, though.
A number of us who are clergy [I'm a pastor in the ELCA] have noted for years the disconnect between our people/members and the leadership at regional/national levels and, even many of our colleagues and our members. As your graphs point out, many if not most of us work in very mixed parishes - purple places in the parlance of the mix of red/blue - and work very hard to say that something larger than political affinities point to the meaning of our work. A few of us have noted that all the ELCA can do is embarrass us and cost us members, as one of the commentators has noted below. For a while, many in our denominations liked to quote Jim Wallis's "God is not a Republican, or a Democrat," but then act and speak as if God is, actually, one of these.
I will note, however, that all Synod and Churchwide officers are elected by laity and clergy (60-40 mix in favor of the laity). So the question is why don't conservative members want to go to Synod Assemblies (and as Churchwide Assembly representatives are elected at Synod Assemblies, it makes it doubly important). It appears to me that conservative members are more congregational minded than progressive members, and/or when their regional or national bodies made a decision they disagree with, conservative members seem more likely to write them off, whereas progressive members seem more likely to want to go back next year to try to change those decisions.
Ryan also posted something lately that showed that weekly attendees of ELCA congregations tend to be more progressive than those who attend more sparingly, so perhaps that gets them elected to Synod Assemblies more often by Congregational Councils.
I'm a Christian None. I voted for Trump in 2024, by holding my breath and barely retaining my stomach contents because he was on the Republican ticket. I suspect that most people that vote Red feel the same way about the party. What I am saying is that equating Christians with Republican only seems right. Nearly everyone who votes Republican actually voted against Democrats. Polling always records what pollsters want to report, not what is actually going on in the real world.
I really wish you’d do some regressions (or fancier statistical things!) instead of just cross-tabs. Do mainline adherents skew more liberal than you’d expect from just their demographics (older, whiter, usually married, typically middle class)? My sense is “slightly,” but it’s hard to tell from just crosstabs.
Isn’t Liberal Protestantism a theological tradition arising from the 19th century?
Does calling Mainline Protestants “liberal” in this century run the risk of conflating political trends with theological roots?
Haven’t the Mainline Protestant denominations (so named because they were highly represented along the affluent Philadelphia Main Line) long been battlegrounds for the Liberal vs Evangelical vs Fundamentalist theological trends at the start of the 20th century?
Don’t the so-called Seven Sisters (I like your application of that term for this) still hold to a great number of the Liberal Protestant theological beliefs, while the denominations that formed from splits (obviously, an ongoing process) adhere less to Liberal Protestantism and more to the Evangelical and/or Fundamentalist Protestant theologies?
Is there data on what the Gospel teaches, on what is taught, generally, in these church categories? To me the most destructive force in the church writ large has been the denial that we are to love God, our neighbors and our enemies. I hear this described as "liberal" but Jesus himself said that loving God and our neighbor were the most important commandments. Once that was Gospel and not "liberal" & to me it still is.
Just had a thought: is there a group in the US that has become less conservative as it has shrunk? Mainline Protestants have experience significant shrinkage and while they were never really majority non-conservative the data seems to suggest a (possibly not-significant) movement to the right.
As someone outside the Christian world I would be interested in what distinguishes church members of Evangelical churches versus mainline ones. Is it a question of theology or a shared feeling. If the latter does this encourage solidarity in such a way that influences voting. Its my observation that Americans arent much interested in theology but I could be wrong about that. From my reading of history the Methodists in the early 19th Century were along with the Baptists the leading evangelical leaders. Did they change or is it that todays evangelical churches have changed.
There was a push for more liberal theology in a lot of the major Protestant churches in the late 19th / early 20th century that emerged from the fundamentalist / modernist controversy.
This moment is captured well in Gresham Machen’s 1920 classic “Christianity and Liberalism.” He ended up founding the OPC and splitting off from PCUSA.
There was a counter-movement called Neo-Orthodoxy that moved many in the Mainlines maybe halfway back to traditional doctrine. But then there were more radical developments starting in the 1960s.
The Mainlines are generally big tents so I think you’ll find they encompass all of these views, they don’t have very strict tests for the belief of their clergy. Whereas an evangelical church is normally going to insist on inerrancy for example (however defined), so it would fire a pastor for even espousing Neo-Orthodoxy.
I think the fact that mainline Protestant churches are close to 50-50 in terms of partisanship ironically reflects a failure of evangelism: if they were better at converting and retaining new members, they would probably be more liberal, simply because currently liberals attend church less than conservatives, and mainline churches are among the few that have institutionally absorbed a liberal position on things like same-sex marriage, women's ordination, ect.
It's actually kind of crazy seeing the voting numbers for the UMC and ELCA given the particular policies those churches have pursued internally. I would have expected a sharp blue-ward trend after 2008.
Just goes to show that a lot of the sensationalism we buy into isn't as earth shattering as we are often made to believe.
Ryan, were there any differences between Non-White and White Mainline Protestants, either as a collective group on the 6 question set, overall or by the Seven Sisters of denominations?
Do you have comparable data that isolates the clergy in the mainline? I'd be very curious to see how that compares to what you describe in this post as the average person in the pew.
This one may be helpful:
https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/a-house-divided-clergy-conscience
And there will be another about clergy views on Thursday.
Generally, Mainline clergy are much more liberal than the average Mainline member. So, if we are judging the Mainlines by their leadership, it is absolutely fine and accurate to call the Mainlines politically liberal.
Also, Ryan Burge surely knows that the Mainlines are indeed *theologically* liberal. Not teasing out the distinction between political liberalism and theological liberalism is a real disservice to the layman who reads the article and makes the title a real misnomer.
I'm a cradle Episcopalian, was a member of an ELCA Lutheran church for many years, and now attending a non denominational Evangelical church. Here's what I see: in the Episcopal and Lutheran churches, the clergy is way way way to the left of the congregation. I got tired of hearing Democratic talking points in every sermon. If I wanted to hear rehashes if NPR, I could stay home. At the Evangelical church, I hate the music and the ugly building, but I get true spiritual nourishment from the sermon. And I find much more sophisticated theology than I did at the mainline churches
What I find interesting is that is almost a mirror opposite of my story; I left evangelical churches and am a now a UMC pastor because it was made clear to me that any deviation from Republican politics would not be accepted. The mainline is really very "purple", so it's not that it's all liberal, but it is that liberals aren't simply pushed out as a normal routine.
I am an Episcopal clergy person, desperately trying to get my colleagues to preach the Gospel instead of liberal politics. For the most part, it falls on deaf ears.
What makes me most sad and frustrated is that they literally do not see the difference. So many of us have decided that liberal politics *is* the Gospel, which I consider blasphemous.
God is so far above the ways we find to divide ourselves from one another.
Some would accuse me of being one of these clergy people preaching "liberal politics."
What I have found since January is that the Gospel is under attack from the highest office in my country, so somehow defending/preaching the Gospel is now labelled as being partisan.
Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, even when it's really hard, and we really don't want to.
'those people' are our neighbors. I think we need to love them, even if it means turning the other cheek. Even if it means seeing beyond the entrenched differences between us. Even if it means turning the other cheek.
I don't find loving my neighbor and turning the other cheek incompatible with standing against injustice and protecting the vulnerable. In fact, they are necessary to doing so.
Yep -- they believe it *is* the Gospel -- my experience as well.
I find it interesting that you feel that Lutheran and Episcopal churches are so partisan when their membership shows healthy representation from both sides. Compare that to a typical nondenominational church which is overwhelmingly republican.
Genuinely curious about what kind of sophisticated theology you’re hearing at the non-denominational Evangelical church. Also curious about its size. Thanks.
Oh for heaven's sake, why would I troll?
Maybe the evangelical church i go to is exceptional. It is Crossroads Church in Staten Island NY and you are welcome to visit it.
The attendance is about 400 a week, divided over 3 services.
As for the theology and the sermons: during Lent, for example, we had a series on the 7 sayings of Christ on the cross, each about 45 minutes long. Lots of indepth analysis of the words, Greek and Hebrew, the role of sacrifice in the OT, was the Trinity actually broken for the time when when Jesus was on the cross, ("why have you forsaken me?") Etc. Etc. It went deep, and was very Biblical and very moving.
I mean that's generally been my experience of non-denominational Evangelical preaching - so I was curious what she was referring to. Sophisticated theology is not generally commercially viable/desirable, which tends to be paramount at these places.
To be honest, I'm a bit surprised about the “more sophisticated theology” part. Can you expand on that?
I'm super curious because I usually attend ELCA Lutheran and Episcopal churches, but just yesterday, I went to a non-denominational charismatic church just to see what it was like.
Most Episcopal and Lutheran sermons I've heard—and for that matter, Catholic homilies—get into the theology quite a bit, helping the audience understand the historical context and theological significance of that week's scripture readings. As one example, I've found that it's very common for the pastor to mention something about the original Greek (or Hebrew) and what the specific meaning of certain key terms is / what gets lost in English translation / different perspectives on how we might interpret it. Which is to say, the focus is on making meaning from scripture.
By contrast, the charismatic church that I went to seemed to do the opposite, giving a sermon with a message and then quoting a bunch of out-of-context sentences from different parts of the Bible as supporting evidence. I think it's great to examine how certain themes are expressed throughout the Bible—but doing so in a way that respects the different contexts, genres, and functions of different parts of scripture. I'm concerned that approaches like that of this church leave a wide open door that could be used to push any desired message and then cherry-pick some sentences that seem to support it. I also worry that it gives churchgoers an overly simplistic impression of the Bible. (In this church's case, I think the sermon was perfectly theologically sound; it's just the approach that concerns me.)
Anyway, those are just my experiences :) I'm really curious about yours!
I've been an evangelical for ~20 years, though have never visited a charismatic church.
I guess I would say my experience of non-denoms has been what you might call churches more in the Tim Keller or R.C. Sproul mode. College-educated, Reformed emphasis but credobaptist. In their expository preaching, discussing the Greek/Hebrew is a common theme. As is citing observations from theologians over the centuries related to the passage at hand. To me, being influenced by Reformed thinking at all means staking down very specific positions on some difficult questions and then relentlessly testing them against Scripture.
I grew up largely in a few Mainline churches (though I was never exposed much to ELCA due to living in the South, but had some exposure to TEC), and I suppose my sense of Mainline theology at that time was that it was like pinning down Jello. The pastor would speak on whatever theme he or she felt like that were at most loosely related to the Scripture readings of the day. Most of them weren't very good preachers and the sermons tended to turn into rambles that ultimately produced an observation about life. But not a lot of specific claims about God's nature or man's proper relation to God, not much that was specifically Christian as opposed to some vague general monotheism.
I would say that as a child, I was never really exposed to the Gospel per se or taught what the big deal was about Jesus. I felt he was just a character in the Bible, the "Son of God", whatever that means. I also remember having a general feeling from a very young age that no one at these churches really believed in God, except my mother (who was raised Baptist).
I've come to assume the squishiness of this theology is because of the "big tent" nature of Mainline churches, and the fact the pastor is probably far to the (theological) left of the elderly congregation, and so doesn't want to say anything to offend them.
This is fascinating. Thanks for sharing!
Out of curiosity, does your church do Communion?
Yes, we observe communion every service at my current church. That was important to me.
I think the old school SBC norm is probably once per month communion. I think a lot of megachurches might be this way too, though I’m not entirely sure where the demarcation lines are between 1/week and 1/month Baptists. But I again suspect it is Reformed influence driving 1/week.
My in-laws go to a 1/month SBC church and I know the younger/lead pastor makes Reformed doctrines much more central to his sermonizing and he has lobbied for 1/week. But I think some of the old-time elders and the old pastor (who serves as a sort of a pastor emeritus) have held their ground on 1/month up to this point for some reason.
As a practical note, there are other Anglican churches (such as ACNA or Continuing Anglican) in the States that may be more up your alley. If you have a high churchmanship, Orthodox or (some) Catholic parishes might be a good fit as well.
Wow, thank you for sharing. As a non-denom evangelical attendees, that's not a narrative I hear. Yet, I imagine it either is or becoming more common.
Fellow Episcopalian here -- and *totally* get what you're saying.
The leadership of TEC is radically more leftist than the folks in the pews. But the denomination is a death spiral and won't get better (if it does) until it's figuratively razed to the ground -- and boy is that coming fast.
Thank you for this post—lots of interesting stuff!
1. I'm a bit confused how the stats on “here’s how the mainline differs from all white Democrats on these questions” then leads to the conclusion that “If the measuring stick is comparing the average mainline Protestant to the average Democrat, then they are clearly right of center.” The measuring stick that was just used wasn't the average Democrat, it was the average *white* Democrat; those are two very different things. What do the numbers look like when comparing the average mainline Democrat to the average Democrat (of any race)?
2. I think it's important to note that the specific political issues that were mentioned here were all social issues. What about economic issues? Foreign policy? Environment? Or even social issues other than these (e.g. immigration, same-sex marriage, gender roles at home, drug laws)? We might end up with a more nuanced picture. Perhaps that's a good subject for a future post 🙂
3. The end of the post says that picturing the average mainline Protestant means picturing someone who voted for Trump. I don't entirely disagree, but I think that's a potentially misleading/overly reductive way to represent the statistics. Something like “out of 5, 3 voted for Tump and 2 for Harris” gives a much more accurate picture that captures the diversity of viewpoints.
Again, thanks for all the data points here!
Generally, when people refer to the mainline as ‘liberal’, they usually mean to call it theologically ‘liberal’, which is taken to refer to the rejection traditional Christian doctrine and/or praxis, usually with regard to certain ‘hot-button’ topics such as homosexuality or women’s ordination, but occasionally also with regard to creedal dogma. Much of the mainline is ‘liberal’ in this sense, inasmuch as their synods/governing bodies have formally adopted such things. I don’t think partisanship is usually in mind here.
I think you are right. I never interpreted mainline liberal Protestantism as politically liberal or more aligned with Democrats. Indeed, Mainline Protestants were traditionally part of the affluent country club wing of the Republican Party, in NY known as Rockefeller Republicans.
The liberal referred to their theological beliefs not their partisan secular politics.
AFAICT the denominations that reject foundational doctrines like the Trinity are if anything more politically conservative on average (Oneness Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons of course). The only really heterodox liberal group, the Unitarians, has left Christianity entirely.
Liberal theology, properly speaking (and as distinguished from, e.g. Neo-Orthodoxy), also generally rejects the Trinity. Regarding the Episcopal Church see John Shelby Spong for example, who more or less rejected every historical Christian doctrine while remaining a bishop in good standing.
But I do think you make a valid point about the groups you name. But I also think they tend towards being highly theologically conservative WITHIN the context of their own tradition, even if their views would be seen as radical to most other Christians.
I keep coming back to the thought that the main thing that distinguishes the Mainlines is a diversity of opinions, with no clear requirements for what a member of the clergy must believe. So in practice, they believe everything from historic Christian doctrines, to Neo-Orthodoxy, to radical 20th and 21st century theological ideas, to even, occasionally, open atheism.
There are groups that are conservative-coded while believing more radical things, at least on the surface, than the median Mainliner in relation to traditional Christian doctrines, but they generally insist on some level of conformity to the radical doctrines in question.
This is generally what defines theological conservativism across traditions, even extending into Islam: a firm belief in the importance of orthodoxy per se, with eternal consequences for getting it wrong beyond a certain point (as to what that exact point is: that will depend to some degree on the tradition).
The Episcopal Church, for quite some time, was also extraordinarily (if not officially) heterodox. I have heard that it is slightly better nowadays, though.
A number of us who are clergy [I'm a pastor in the ELCA] have noted for years the disconnect between our people/members and the leadership at regional/national levels and, even many of our colleagues and our members. As your graphs point out, many if not most of us work in very mixed parishes - purple places in the parlance of the mix of red/blue - and work very hard to say that something larger than political affinities point to the meaning of our work. A few of us have noted that all the ELCA can do is embarrass us and cost us members, as one of the commentators has noted below. For a while, many in our denominations liked to quote Jim Wallis's "God is not a Republican, or a Democrat," but then act and speak as if God is, actually, one of these.
I will note, however, that all Synod and Churchwide officers are elected by laity and clergy (60-40 mix in favor of the laity). So the question is why don't conservative members want to go to Synod Assemblies (and as Churchwide Assembly representatives are elected at Synod Assemblies, it makes it doubly important). It appears to me that conservative members are more congregational minded than progressive members, and/or when their regional or national bodies made a decision they disagree with, conservative members seem more likely to write them off, whereas progressive members seem more likely to want to go back next year to try to change those decisions.
Ryan also posted something lately that showed that weekly attendees of ELCA congregations tend to be more progressive than those who attend more sparingly, so perhaps that gets them elected to Synod Assemblies more often by Congregational Councils.
I'm a Christian None. I voted for Trump in 2024, by holding my breath and barely retaining my stomach contents because he was on the Republican ticket. I suspect that most people that vote Red feel the same way about the party. What I am saying is that equating Christians with Republican only seems right. Nearly everyone who votes Republican actually voted against Democrats. Polling always records what pollsters want to report, not what is actually going on in the real world.
What would voting for a democrat have done to your stomach?
Wouldn't have happened. The party is hopelessly off the tracks. I don't see anyone worth considering.
I’d still vote for hopelessly off the tracks vs the alternative. At least off the tracks didn’t break the law or incite and insurrection
I really wish you’d do some regressions (or fancier statistical things!) instead of just cross-tabs. Do mainline adherents skew more liberal than you’d expect from just their demographics (older, whiter, usually married, typically middle class)? My sense is “slightly,” but it’s hard to tell from just crosstabs.
Some questions:
Isn’t Liberal Protestantism a theological tradition arising from the 19th century?
Does calling Mainline Protestants “liberal” in this century run the risk of conflating political trends with theological roots?
Haven’t the Mainline Protestant denominations (so named because they were highly represented along the affluent Philadelphia Main Line) long been battlegrounds for the Liberal vs Evangelical vs Fundamentalist theological trends at the start of the 20th century?
Don’t the so-called Seven Sisters (I like your application of that term for this) still hold to a great number of the Liberal Protestant theological beliefs, while the denominations that formed from splits (obviously, an ongoing process) adhere less to Liberal Protestantism and more to the Evangelical and/or Fundamentalist Protestant theologies?
Is there data on what the Gospel teaches, on what is taught, generally, in these church categories? To me the most destructive force in the church writ large has been the denial that we are to love God, our neighbors and our enemies. I hear this described as "liberal" but Jesus himself said that loving God and our neighbor were the most important commandments. Once that was Gospel and not "liberal" & to me it still is.
Just had a thought: is there a group in the US that has become less conservative as it has shrunk? Mainline Protestants have experience significant shrinkage and while they were never really majority non-conservative the data seems to suggest a (possibly not-significant) movement to the right.
The UCC being Republican in 2024 was a big surprise, considering that they are the most liberal of the Seven Sisters.
As someone outside the Christian world I would be interested in what distinguishes church members of Evangelical churches versus mainline ones. Is it a question of theology or a shared feeling. If the latter does this encourage solidarity in such a way that influences voting. Its my observation that Americans arent much interested in theology but I could be wrong about that. From my reading of history the Methodists in the early 19th Century were along with the Baptists the leading evangelical leaders. Did they change or is it that todays evangelical churches have changed.
There was a push for more liberal theology in a lot of the major Protestant churches in the late 19th / early 20th century that emerged from the fundamentalist / modernist controversy.
This moment is captured well in Gresham Machen’s 1920 classic “Christianity and Liberalism.” He ended up founding the OPC and splitting off from PCUSA.
There was a counter-movement called Neo-Orthodoxy that moved many in the Mainlines maybe halfway back to traditional doctrine. But then there were more radical developments starting in the 1960s.
The Mainlines are generally big tents so I think you’ll find they encompass all of these views, they don’t have very strict tests for the belief of their clergy. Whereas an evangelical church is normally going to insist on inerrancy for example (however defined), so it would fire a pastor for even espousing Neo-Orthodoxy.
I think the fact that mainline Protestant churches are close to 50-50 in terms of partisanship ironically reflects a failure of evangelism: if they were better at converting and retaining new members, they would probably be more liberal, simply because currently liberals attend church less than conservatives, and mainline churches are among the few that have institutionally absorbed a liberal position on things like same-sex marriage, women's ordination, ect.
It's actually kind of crazy seeing the voting numbers for the UMC and ELCA given the particular policies those churches have pursued internally. I would have expected a sharp blue-ward trend after 2008.
Just goes to show that a lot of the sensationalism we buy into isn't as earth shattering as we are often made to believe.
Ryan, were there any differences between Non-White and White Mainline Protestants, either as a collective group on the 6 question set, overall or by the Seven Sisters of denominations?
Non-white mainline Protestants is just not a category worth considering that much, Eric.
90% of the mainline is white. Mainliners are 10% of the sample.
So non-white mainline is ~1% of the country.
Do you read Rod Dreher? He found this post very encouraging, as a partisan Republican.