Duke University

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What in the world is happening to evangelicalism in 21st Century America?

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What in the world is happening to evangelicalism in 21st Century America?

In nine-plus years of these weekly Memos, the Religion Guy has sometimes complained that the news media pay too little attention to e.g. the “Mainline” Protestant denominations or to white Catholics as all-important swing voters who decide elections.

Nonetheless, as GetReligion.org prepares to close down February 2, it’s understandable that this next-to-last Memo would send fellow journalists a few notations about the U.S. Evangelical Protestant movement. (Full disclosure: This is The Guy’s own private, lifelong home, even though he was raised in a “Mainline” denomination, worshipped for years in another and currently belongs to a third one.)

Evangelicalism, in one form or another, was analyzed in 43 prior Memos. Why so much attention?

Evangelicalism may be confusing in terms of organizations and fiefdoms, but since World War II has developed into the largest and most dynamic force in American religion, striding into the hole in the public square created by the decline of the old Mainline. Also evangelicalism has been the most disruptive, and certainly one of the evident influences within the Republican Party.

Something odd is happening to this movement in the 21st Century. The Memo has dealt with relentless politicking, conflicts over race and women’s role, squalid scandals and has discerned signs of a “crack-up.”

Pundits regularly tell us that in the Donald Trump era we’re no longer even sure what an “evangelical” is, that it’s as much a socio-political label as a religious one and that this redefinition damages churches’ spiritual appeal to outsiders. Maybe so, but despite the media focus on outspoken agitators on the national level, local evangelicals are the least politicized faith grouping, according to noteworthy Duke University data at pages 52-58 in this (.pdf) document.

Then there’s that ongoing head-scratcher: Why have fat majorities of white evangelicals supported Trump, a morally bewildering politician and now a criminal and civil court defendant? For one thing, they automatically give lopsided support to Republican nominees, whether Romney, McCain or Bush, just like Black Protestant, Jewish, non-religious and anti-religious Americans have done for Democrats. Many truly believe that they have no choice.


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Latest dissection of Trump-Era evangelicalism offers one dose of insider savvy

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Latest dissection of Trump-Era evangelicalism offers one dose of insider savvy

What if Donald Trump wins? That’s the big question in half of the United States.

The Atlantic magazine unleashed an unhappy New Year package of 24 essays forecasting that Trump 2.0 will be an American hellscape on abortion, “anxiety,” “autocracy,” “character,” China, civil rights, climate, courts, “disinformation,” “extremism,” “freedom,” immigration, journalism, the military, misogyny, NATO, partisanship, science, etc. etc.

Spot something missing in that list?

Yep, that would be religion, despite its profound impact on the wider culture, and vice versa.

This odd omission (where are you when we need you, Emma Green?) is somewhat compensated for with a separate item by staff writer Tim Alberta (alberta.reports@gmail.com) excerpted from his new book “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism” (Harper). It’s a religious follow-up to his 2019 “American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump” (also from Harper).

There’s a pile of other recent books and articles that bemoan the sprawling U.S. evangelical movement over the militant politicization of a Trump-Era growth sector. Some of this literature reminds one of outside anthropologist Margaret Mead scrutinizing teens in American Samoa.

Alberta’s opus thus commands special attention because he’s been immersed in the evangelical subculture since his boyhood as a Michigan preacher’s kid. He’s no “ex-vangelical” dropout, and aspires to “honor God with this book,” just as Southern-Baptist-in-exile Russell Moore sought to do in last year’s “Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America” (Sentinel/Penguin). Alberta here is simultaneously a journalistic chronicler and a conservative Protestant lay preacher who applies numerous Bible verses in favor of good old 20th Century evangelicalism over against the newfangled 21st Century’s New Right.


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This is still news? Mainline Protestantism, once central in U.S. culture, keeps collapsing

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This is still news? Mainline Protestantism, once central in U.S. culture, keeps collapsing

Until the 1960s, more than half of Americans identified with the “Mainline” Protestant churches that “have played an outsized role in America’s history,” says a Sept. 13 report from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI).

No longer, as is well known among clergy and parishioners who pay attention, scholars and religion journalists.

Is this news? Throughout America’s history, no religious community has suffered anything remotely like the Mainliners’ unremitting collapse (click here for waves of Ryan Burge ink) over the past six decades — even as the national population grew.

Several recent reports indicate that this remarkable situation is continuing, and well worth updating.

Definition: “Mainline” denominations, the most prominent of which are known to sociologists as the “Seven Sisters,” have roots in the Colonial or Early Republic eras, memberships that are mostly white and relatively affluent and well-educated, affiliated with the National Council of Churches and World Council and share a doctrinal commitment to pluralism or liberalism that contrasts sharply with conservative and “evangelical” Protestant groups (including many believers in their own pews).

Last week, bishops of the Episcopal Church discussed the latest statistics during an online meeting. Though offering income has held steady, there was a 6% drop in membership from 2021 to 2022, the worst ever, and that total is down 23% over the past decade to the current 1,584,685. Average worship attendance nationwide rose a bit to 373,000, a slight bump as the COVID-19 crisis waned, but down 43% over the decade. The median local congregation now has 111 members and Sunday attendance of 35.

This denomination maintains and issues good statistics, and The Guy suggests a more thorough look would cover tell-tale indexes of vitality such as trends in infant and adult baptisms, weddings, Sunday School enrollment, ordinations and foreign mission staffs and spending. For additional info on this, see this new post from Burge: “The State of the Episcopal Church in 2022.”


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Today's complicated politics: Are evangelical pews 'red' while more pulpits are 'blue'?

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Today's complicated politics: Are evangelical pews 'red' while more pulpits are 'blue'?

Like everybody else, American religion writers are caught in a politics-drenched environment that for Republicans gets hot with the first debates August 23 and September 27 and presumably wraps up with the Ohio primary March 19, if not before.

Given the pertinence of the religion factor in U.S. politics, kudos to Yonat Shimron of Religion News Service for her piece last week spotlighting a significant article — “Clergy-lay political (mis)alignment in 2019–2020” — in the September issue of the international academic journal Politics and Religion.

The authors, Duke University sociology Professor Mark Chaves and post-doctoral researcher Joseph Roso, set out to decide whether there’s a significant gap on politics between clergy leading local congregations and the lay members in each of U.S. religion’s four largest Christian niches — “Evangelical” Protestant, “Mainline” Protestant, Black Protestant and Catholic.

The conclusions are based upon reliable and representative sets of data (see the article for particulars), The Guy perpetually chides political reporters for neglecting Catholics, who are almost always the pivotal swing voters. But reporters, who must assess hyper-newsmaker Donald Trump’s prospects for nomination and election, will be especially interested in whether there’s a significant gap between the loyally Republican white evangelical clergy and laity.

Answer: No. Their pastors and lay members are overwhelmingly the same politically, and that’s also the case with Black preachers and parishioners. However, unity on conservative politics may or may not be the same thing as unity on a particular candidate.

Meanwhile, “misaligned” differences occur with Catholics and especially with Mainline Protestants, whose pulpits vs. pews gap has been a topic of lively conversation for a half-century.

Check out the article for the full numbers and analysis. All the findings are important, but here are some key ones.


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Podcast: Are Brigham Young sports controversies about sports, religion or politics?

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Podcast: Are Brigham Young sports controversies about sports, religion or politics?

I have a journalism question, one that will require some time travel. Let’s flash back to the 2021 football game between the Brigham Young Cougars and the Baylor Bears, which was played in Waco, Texas, an interesting city known to many as “Jerusalem on the Brazos.”

After the first BYU score, a significant number of Baylor students are heard chanting “F*** the Mormons!” over and over. Or maybe, since we are talking about folks from a Baptist university, the chant is “Convert the Mormons!” The chant doesn’t focus on the “Cougars,” but on BYU’s obvious heritage with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The chants were strong enough to be heard on broadcast media and, within minutes, there are clear audio recordings posted on social media.

My question, a which I asked during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in): Would this nasty, crude event be considered a valid news story? In national coverage, would the religious ties of the two schools — soon to be rivals in the Big 12 — be discussed? In other words, would this be a religion-news story, as well as a sports story?

I think it’s pretty obvious that the answers would be “yes” and, again, “yes.”

This brings us, of course, to two BYU sports stories from recent weeks — one that received massive national coverage and the other that, well, didn’t get nearly as much ink. I think it’s valid to ask "Why?’ in both cases.

Before I share some links to coverage of the two stories, let’s pause and consider this related Religion News Service report: “Nearly 200 religious colleges deemed ‘unsafe’ for LGBTQ students by Campus Pride.” Here is the overture:

Dozens of religious universities across the country, including Seattle Pacific University in Washington and Brigham Young University in Utah, were listed as unsafe and discriminatory campuses for LGBTQ students by Campus Pride, a national organization advocating for inclusive colleges and universities.

Fewer than 10 of the 193 schools on the list released Thursday (Sept. 8), were not religiously affiliated or did not list a religious affiliation, according to Campus Pride.

The lengthy Campus Pride report on BYU opens with this statement (the shorter Baylor item appears here):

Brigham Young University has qualified for the Worst List because it has an established and well-documented history of anti-LGBTQ discrimination that endangers victims of sexual assault and has resulted in a call for it to not be included as a Big 12 school.

The key word, of course, is “endangers.”


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Trigger warning! New Crossroads podcast contains dis-United Methodist time travel

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I don’t need to write a new GetReligion post about this week’s “Crossroads,” do I?

After all, this podcast conversation with host Todd Wilken (click here to listen) focuses on why United Methodists on the doctrinal left and right, as well as establishment players in the middle, are now bracing for divorce. In one form or another, I’ve been writing this post since the early 1980s.

What we need is a time machine (I’m a fan of Doctor Who No. 4) so that I could let readers bounce around in United Methodist history and see why all those new headlines about a proposed plan to break-up this complicated church need to be linked to trends and events in the past.

So here we go. Stop No. 1 in this time-travel adventure is Denver, in the year 1980 (care of a GetReligion post with this headline: “United Methodism doctrine? Think location, location, location”).

… It was in 1980 — note that this was one-third of a century ago — that Bishop Melvin Wheatley, Jr., of the Rocky Mountain Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church announced … he was openly rejecting his church's teaching that homosexual acts were "incompatible with Christian teaching."

Two years later, this United Methodist bishop appointed an openly gay pastor to an urban church in Denver. When challenged, Wheatley declared: "Homosexuality is a mysterious gift of God's grace. I clearly do not believe homosexuality is a sin."

This date is crucial, because it underlines the fact that the United Methodist Church’s doctrine that homosexual acts are “incompatible with Christian teaching” has been on the books for decades.

That’s why the following passage — from the New York Times a few days ago — is so misleading. The wording here gives the average reader the impression that this doctrine is something that conservatives pulled out of their hats in 2019. This Times report stated that a global split has been:


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Inside Higher Ed adds snark in click-bait shot at Baylor's doctrines on sex and marriage

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Does anyone remember that post I wrote a week or so ago about the decision at Duke University to push Young Life off campus because of its requirement that its officers affirm the evangelical group’s teachings on LGBTQ issues?

I know that these stories keep popping up every now and then and it’s hard to keep it all straight in your mind.

Journalists often have trouble with the fine details, as well. Lots of editors seem to think these battles focus on random corporate “policies” as opposed to “doctrines” built on centuries of Christian traditions about the Bible, marriage and sex. And here is another crucial detail from that earlier GetReligion post:

Right up front, note this: Duke is a private university and, thus, its leaders have every right to define the doctrines and covenants that govern their campus. That’s true for liberal once-Christian schools as well as many traditional colleges and universities.

This brings us to those jesters in Rice University’s Marching Owl Band (MOB for short). The band’s style? Think Stanford University, only with less musical clout. The MOB motto: “The marching band that NEVER marches!”

MOB performances combine comedy riffs with bits of music. To no one’s surprise, the MOB mocked famously Baptist Baylor University the other day. Here’s the top of the Waco Tribune-Herald report:

The Rice Marching Owl Band (MOB), which describes itself as the university’s “infamously irreverent non-marching marching band,” took a shot at Baylor’s LGBTQ stance Saturday with its esoteric halftime show.

The band formed the outline of a Bear, performed a Star Wars-like lightsaber battle, then ended its routine by spelling out the word “Pride” while students holding rainbow flags joined in and the band played "YMCA" by the Village People. Baylor has been in the news this year for its denial of a charter for LGBTQ student groups, as it “affirms the biblical understanding of sexuality,” according to an official university statement.

Moving on to click-bait land.


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Podcast thinking: Why do many reporters avoid theological news on religious left?

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Back in the fall of 1993, I made — believe it or not — my first-ever trip as an adult to New York City. I had covered many important news stories in American and around the world, but had never hit the Big Apple.

I stayed in a guest room at Union Theological Seminary, since I would be attending what turned out to be, for me, a pivotal religion-beat conference at the nearby Columbia University School of Journalism. But that’s another story for another day.

Here is the story for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in), which is linked this week’s Twitter explosion in which Union Seminary students confessed their environmental sins to some plants and sought forgiveness.

On that beautiful New York Sunday morning, I decided to head to the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine. I was, at the time, an evangelical Episcopalian (with high-church sympathies) at I was trying to run into my wife’s favorite author — Madeleine L’Engle (click here for my tribute when she died). She was writer in residence at the cathedral, but later told me that she worshipped at an evangelical parish in the city.

Why did she do that? Well, in part because of services like the “Missa Gaia (Earth Mass)” I attended that Sunday. As I wrote later in a piece called “Liturgical Dances With Wolves”:

In the Kyrie, the saxophonist and his ensemble improvised to the taped cry of a timber wolf. A humpback whale led the Sanctus.

Skeptic Carl Sagan preached, covering turf from the joyful “bisexual embraces'' of earthworms to the greedy sins of capitalists. The earth, he stressed, is one body made of creatures who eat and drink each other, inhabit each other's bodies, and form a sacred “web of interaction and interdependence that embraces the planet.'' … The final procession was spectacular and included an elephant, a camel, a vulture, a swarm of bees in a glass frame, a bowl of blue-green algae and an elegantly decorated banana.

The key moment for me?

Before the bread and wine were brought to the altar, the musicians offered a rhythmic chant that soared into the cathedral vault. … “Praises to Obatala, ruler of the Heavens. Praises to Obatala, ruler of the Heavens. Praises to Yemenja, ruler of the waters of life. Praises to Yemenja, ruler of the waters of life. Praises to Ausar, ruler of Amenta, the realm of the ancestors. Praises to Ra and Ausar, rulers of the light and the resurrected soul.” …

Then the congregation joined in and everyone sang “Let all mortal flesh keep silence.' “


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Religion News Service story on Young Life avoids crucial, complex doctrine questions at Duke

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If you dig into the history of Duke University — formerly Trinity College — it’s hard to avoid its deep roots in the evangelical Methodist movement.

The key, today, is that Duke is a private university, one defined by research, basketball and modern doctrines linked to its powerful nonsectarian identity. You can still see a few Methodist ties that do not bind in the way the school’s trustees operate (click here for more on that).

However, it is educational — when considering Duke history — to follow the money.

The University has historic ties to the United Methodist Church. The institution was begun in 1838-39 when Methodist and Quaker families in northwest Randolph County united to transform Brown's Schoolhouse into Union Institute, thus providing permanent education for their children. A formal agreement with the Methodist Church was entered into in 1859 when the name of the school was changed to Trinity College. The motto, Eruditio et Religio, which is based on a Charles Wesley hymn, and the official seal, both of which are still in use today, were adopted in 1859. The name of Trinity College continues as the undergraduate college of the University.

The most significant development in the history of the school came with the adoption of Trinity College as the primary beneficiary of the philanthropy of the Duke family in 1889. This occurred in part because the college was an institution of the Methodist Church and Washington Duke practiced stewardship as taught by his church. 

So here is an interesting question linked to a current doctrinal dispute on the Duke campus.

Right up front, note this: Duke is a private university and, thus, its leaders have every right to define the doctrines and covenants that govern their campus. That’s true for liberal once-Christian schools as well as many traditional colleges and universities. The question for journalists and lawyers is whether Duke leaders are being consistent in the proclamation and application of their new doctrines.

This leads us to a recent Religion News Service article that ran with this headline: “Duke University’s student government rejects Young Life over LGBTQ policies.” The problem is that Young Life doesn’t have “policies” that are independent of 2,000 years of traditional Christian “doctrines” on marriage and sexuality.


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