Mainstream Protestant Decline.

Loose Cannon posts on an evergreen issue for the theological left - the Catholic "priest shortage" and the ostensible need to expand the pool of potential priests. This trope inevitably involves a liberal panacea - ordination of women, ordinattion of gays, ordination of married people - by a liberal.

I am always amazed by the lack of curiousity shown by nearly everyone involved in these suggestions. Aren't they at all curious to see if their proposal would work?

The data suggests that these "reforms" are exactly the thing that a church should avoid if it wants to thrive. It is inarguable that mainstream Protestant denominations began to hemorrhage members in the 1970s, when they began to adopt the popular culture via accepting divorce, contraception, women priests and, in some cases, active homosexual clergy, and that this trend hasn't abated.

Correlation is not causation and mainstream Protestantism trundled along healthily with married clergy for centuries. Moreover, the cultural issues, such as gay marriage, are often a stalking horse for deep theological issues in the disintegration of these denominations. But anyone interested in the health of their church ought to be interested in whether there is some common denominator in the adoption of liberalism and the decline in membership.

This First Things essay from 1993 offers an explanation. The author describes the Baby Boomers in the Presbyterian church as "lay liberals":

But we also discovered a pattern in the theological views of people who, on the Gallup-style theological questions, seemed to pick and choose their responses in unorthodox ways. We have named this pattern the theology of lay liberalism. It is "liberal" because its defining characteristic is the rejection of the view that Christianity is the only religion with a valid claim to truth. It is "lay" because it does not reflect any of the theological systems contained in the writings or seminary lectures of today's post-orthodox Christian intellectuals.

Lay liberalism is not a fighting faith:

One indication that lay liberalism is not an energizing "faith" is the fact that its advocates told us they rarely attempt to convert anyone to their point of view. They believe that missionaries should not try to convert people who already have a religion, and they have a strong aversion to the aggressive evangelism of Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, fundamentalists, and certain Baptists.

The prospects for churches in the grip of lay liberalism is dim:

Perhaps some now unforeseen cultural shift will one day bring millions of baby boom dropouts back to the mainline churches. But nothing we discovered in our study suggests the likelihood of such a shift. If the mainline churches want to regain their vitality, their first step must be to address theological issues head-on. They must listen to the voices of lay liberals and provide compelling answers to the question, "What's so special about Christianity?"

Which nicely brings us to my post from this weekend, which reported on a Visialia church that had "disaffiliated" from its denomination after 150 years because that denomination's national convention had "affirmed universalism and stated that it was "morally, ethically and spiritually wrong" to assert Jesus Christ as the only way for salvation."

That denomination probably has both women and married clergy, and it is certainly headed for extinction.