What is clear is that the situation now is more extreme than we usually allow ourselves to think and we need to get into the right frame of mind about who our friends and enemies are. As a Reformed guy in a currently independent Reformed congregation I recognize the major Reformed denominations, as a whole, must be regarded as hostile, even as individual people and congregations in them are friendlies. And the people and congregations of rival Protestant streams that hold fast to the common faith of our fathers (and that includes morality as much as theology!) are also friends fighting their own set of hostiles. I have your back, insofar as I can help you. I hope you’ll have mine.

Anglican, Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, or Reformed- it doesn’t matter. In 2024, wherever you look in Protestantism it is some variation of the same sad story. Apart from some micro or regional denominational iterations or independent congregations carrying on their respective traditions alone, all the nationwide, legacy denominations are fried or nearly fried, doctrinally and morally speaking. It goes without saying that this is true of the Mainline churches, and has been for decades. I am not primarily thinking of them, but more specifically have their “conservative” cousins in mind- the ones that likely exist because of some previous split with an apostatizing Mainline denomination and that were founded with the explicit intention of conserving the historic teachings and practices of their respective traditions.

I am prompted to make these observations after the latest betrayal of the faith by the bishops of ACNA, which unanimously selected a pro-women’s ordination and race woke archbishop last weekend, despite a significant internal division about the WO issue, and woke batshittery in general, throughout the communion. One observer commented:

“ACNA is unserious about the orthodox faith and traditional Anglicanism. Conservative resurgence is on a ventilator now. But maybe it always was. There are no ACNA based bishops. Knock it off.”

You could swap out ACNA/Anglicanism/bishops with almost any other denomination/tradition/top officers and the statement would be just as true. This is happening everywhere in conservative Protestantism. The Left advances within them inexorably, the conservative wing of leadership talks a big game about standing firm or taking it back, said leadership caves or fights incompetently, the faithful laity and less influential leaders are betrayed. At best, the orthodox might have a good year or two at synod, GA, or whatever, and the lurch seems to be stopped temporarily. But it always resumes because the troublemakers are never rebuked, discipline, or purged. They continue to plot and caucus and manipulate the levers of soft and hard power while the cucked conservatives refuse to sully their hands with such ungentlemanly tactics and box out the few based people in their ranks who would.

Yes, faithful minorities within each denomination hang on no matter how bad it goes. Yes, these churches are not all equally far gone. But the elite apparatus in them all is riddled with regimevangelicals and pretend conservatives that won’t really fight them, and the necessary resources and manpower to reverse the leftward momentum has already been eroded away. They are all of them living on borrowed time. The days of the major “evangelical” bodies in every Protestant stream are numbered. The orthodox parties within them will eventually be brought to heel and made to accept the current heresy, convincing themselves that it was a principled compromise and they will not allow any further drift next time, so that they can sleep at night. Those with more integrity will be driven out by disciplinary action or compelled to withdraw by conscience or disgust as dialogue becomes diktat and orthodox doctrine moves from the standard to just one option in a “big tent” to being proscribed altogether. And then these “conservative,” “confessional,” “traditional,” “Bible-believing” denominations will go full Mainline, joining the family of Regime-approved state denominations before their eventual demographic death.

Is this the end of Protestantism? No, I don’t think so. I believe the future of Protestantism is going to be orthodox believers of various traditions informally partnering and standing together against a hostile culture and a hostile set of state churches. Many congregations have already departed from these failed denominations. Some are going it alone for now. Others have found or formed new networks and alliances. I do not believe independency is any kind of ideal for church polity, but it seems to be an understandable necessity for many congregations in this time. Why join a legacy denomination when every option you have is currently sinking?

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