A survey conducted by Trinity College (CT) in 2008 found that, since 2001, the mainline  has fallen in membership the fastest while non-denominational churches have been “trending upward.” “Fewer than 200,000 people favored this term in 1990 but in 2008 it accounts for over eight million Americans,” the survey reports.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s piece “Can Liberal Christianity be Saved?” created quite a stir a few weeks ago. Douthat’s evaluation of liberal Christianity is that it has “simply collapsed” and that “the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism.”

A notable response from one of said liberal Christians, Diana Butler Bass, received a lot of attention as well. She expanded the question in a column on the Huffington Post entitled “Can Christianity be Saved?” She essentially argued that, yes, liberal Christianity is declining, but the conservatives are going down the tubes as well. Citing the Southern Baptist Convention and the Roman Catholic Church among other denominations, Bass writes “Decline is not exclusive to the Episcopal Church, nor to liberal denominations–it is a reality facing the whole of American Christianity.”

She then argues that there is renewal happening in the mainline denominations by Christians who “link spirituality with social justice as a path of peace and biblical faith.” It seems, however, that those churches who are embracing this social justice-focused path are also embracing heterodoxy in the name of said justice and their numbers are declining fast.

Douthat recently responded to her evaluation of the future of Christianity and I also want to look at her claim that conservative evangelicalism is declining in the same way the liberal mainline has precipitously fallen. With the caveat that, frequently, surveys that use self-identification exclusively do not take into account personal piety – someone who grew up Baptist and does not believe in the historical resurrection of Christ can still call himself a Baptist – numbers from The Pew Forum and other organizations can help examine Bass’ assertion. The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life conducts extensive surveys surrounding the influx and decline of different denominations. The latest report finds that, indeed, as Bass wrote, every Christian denomination has declined in size and the number of “nones” – people who claim no religious affiliation – has increased significantly in the past two decades. The combination of these two phenomena, however, gives a hint to the nature of decline in the mainline church.

The mainline church is much older than the population at large. The Pew Forum found that “approximately half (51%) of mainline Protestant churches are ages 50 and older,” contrasted with the general population in which only 41% are part of that age group.

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