Why It's Really Hard to Be Optimistic About the Mainline

Age, Size, and Polling Problems - Oh My.

I’ve gotta say - the comments I get on this Substack tend to be really high quality. Which is nice! Nothing is worse than scrolling through my mentions on Twitter and seeing a bunch of ignorant, ill-informed folks spew nonsense just to elicit a response from me (or someone else). Word to the wise - don’t take the bait. Just keep scrolling.

Well, I had a particularly good question about a graph that I had posted about abortion by religion tradition here. Specifically, some commenters were intrigued by the trend line for young mainline Protestants. The point estimates looked to be all over the place and they wanted to know what was up with that. Well, that got me to writing a bit of code and coming to a really pertinent conclusion - there just aren’t that many young mainline Protestants in the United States anymore.

Here’s what I mean in graphical form:

In the early 1970s, nearly ten percent of the samples collected by the General Social Survey were mainline Protestants between the ages of 18 and 35 years old. That’s great because it means that I have enough folks in that subgroup to do some analysis. For instance, there were 147 of them in the 1972 wave of the GSS. Not huge, but just fine to break down by a variable like gender.

However, over time that percentage has continued to drop in a really consistent way. By 1990, only 7.5% of the sample was younger mainliners. Then, things get a whole lot worse. By 1994, it was clearly below 5%. It dropped in half again by 2006. And now in the last couple waves of the GSS, the share who are mainline Protestants between the ages of 18 and 35 years old has stuck right around 1.5%.

Guess how many actual people that is in real numbers? In 2014 it was 40 folks. In 2018, it was only 35 people. It’s a bit larger in the last two surveys (about 60), but that’s only because the total sample size got larger. Think of it this way, if I were doing a typical general population survey of 1,000 random adults, I should expect somewhere between 10 and 20 young mainline Protestants. That’s not more than a rounding error. I can’t do any type of analysis on a group that small.

So, I wanted to take this opportunity to show you a bunch of disparate results I found by digging through the annual statistical reports about The Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church (USA) that I’ve been collected that all point to the same conclusion - it’s about as bleak as it can be for the mainline right now.