The Episcopal Church in America was never very large, like Methodism or Baptists, but it was, as The Post noted, prestigious beyond its numbers and occupied a unique niche in American Christianity. For that reason, although its decline will continue, it may outlast other Mainline Protestant denominations.

The Episcopal Church is selling or leasing its legendary headquarters building in New York city, from whose perch its Presiding Bishops long ruled and resided in a penthouse apartment overlooking the Manhattan skyline. One former presiding bishop reputedly decorated the penthouse all in white, which allegedly matched her chilly personality, provoking snarly critics to deride her as the “white witch.”

This sale could be seen as a metaphor for the collapse of liberal Protestantism, if any more metaphors are needed. More widely, it illustrates the collapse of institutional religion in America, liberal or not.

Mainline Protestant denominations have been pulling their headquarters and agencies from New York for decades. The United Church of Christ quit New York in 1990 for a new headquarters building in Cleveland, which it sold in 2022 for smaller rental space a mile away. The Presbyterian Church (USA) headquarters quit New York in 1988 for Louisville, Kentucky. United Methodism’s largest agency, the General Board of Global Ministries, quit New York in 2016 for Atlanta. The National Council of Churches quit New York in 2013 for Washington, DC.

The Episcopal church across sixty years has lost 56 percent of its members. United Methodism has lost 65 percent of its members. The Presbyterian Church (USA) has lost 75 percent of its members. The United Church of Christ has lost about 70 percent of members. These denominations long maintained extensive staffs in New York, as did the once influential but now barely existing National Council of Churches.

Their continuous membership decline began in the mid-1960s. We can mostly fault theological liberalism, which minimized if not disdained evangelism, upon which all religions depend for life and growth. Mainline Protestantism had always been dominant in America and robustly assumed it always would remain so, with or without any effort. It choked on its own over confidence.

But in recent years the Mainline denominations have been joined by declining evangelical denominations. The Southern Baptist Convention has lost nearly 25 percent of its members, and the cause is not theological liberalism.

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