The progressive left is happy for American Christianity to be privatized. They are more than happy to subsidize the evangelicals’ tax-exempt irrelevance. It is the denominations they fear. That is why they have captured the major ones and are frustrated that the SBC still eludes them. To my friends in the SBC, I say: do not give the left what it wants.

Brad East asks us to “imagine a world without Protestantism” in a recent First Things article. By this, he means the via media between Romanism and the radical Anabaptists. This was—and still is—called the magisterial Reformation, an attempt to reform (and by that, the reformers meant they wanted to conserve) the Church catholic. The magisterial Reformation was institutional, conservative, and Erastian.

It was also deeply at odds with America’s frontier spirit, according to East. Only in the soil of the American frontier could a radical third way emerge. That third way is now poised to eclipse the magisterial Protestant tradition entirely. East calls this third way evangelical. Hardly original, he readily admits, but if the shoe fits…

This “third species in the genus of Western Christianity” is biblicist (the Bible over all), autonomous (congregational polity), egalitarian (not so much opposed to women’s ordination as to ordination altogether), entrepreneurial (the pastor may run a lawn-care business, roast coffee, or monetize his podcast), evangelistic (always be converting), and, finally, affective (Hillsong).

Between these hinterland evangelicals and an elite Roman Catholic intelligentsia lies “the vast middle of American Christianity,” which, East says, is “utterly hollowed out.” To be sure, some believers struggle to hang on in groups like the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS), or the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), where they try to enact the old mainline via media of theological conservatism and high institutionalism. You could argue that I am one of them. But we are too small to matter. “Each of these groups is a fraction of a fraction of the American population. Whatever their future, they will not be resuming their place at the commanding heights of the culture,” East concludes definitively.

Not so fast.

Everyone forgets about the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the largest Protestant denomination, and, given its colonial heritage, arguably a “mainline” denomination, despite historical ties to the Old South. Though in steady decline, it still boasts over 12 million members and six theological seminaries. Its members exhibit many of the attributes East ascribes to his “third species” evangelicalism, but they are also organized and, by the standards of the progressive mainline, conservative.

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