The Frigidaire–and the Church Named After It–Aren’t What They Used to Be

The failure of of the ice maker in our refrigerator–which we thought premature–has led us to videos like this, where we found out we were blessed:

One of the brands mentioned as “not what they used to be” was Frigidaire. Fundie and fundie-adjacent types will recall the days when preachers–sweating, bawling and thumping the pulpit with their Bibles–would disparage the “Church of the Frigidaire” as cold, lifeless and unable to bring people to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.

They were hollering about the Main Line churches.

Well, they evidently made their point:

If the percentage of Americans who identify as evangelical or Catholic is holding steady, where are the “nones” coming from? The data seems to provide a clear answer: The growth of the “nones” has come almost entirely at the expense of mainline Protestantism. In the mid-1970s, 31 percent of Americans were mainline Protestant, and in the 1950s, perhaps as many as 50 percent were. But today, only 9 percent of Americans identify as mainline Protestant, and that figure is likely to drop even further in the next few years, as older mainline Protestant church members pass away. With only 2 percent of Americans age 18-40 identifying with a mainline Protestant denomination, the future of mainline Protestantism looks bleak.

I suppose that the church I grew up with–and I’m sure the one I spent 2.5 years in during my early years in the family business–would classify as “churches of the Frigidaire.” Like the appliance whose moniker they were stuck with, they did their job: they kept the contents at a constant temperature, did so without a lot of maintenance and for a long period of time, and of course the ice maker was necessary for the wet bar which most of the membership watered at (especially the Whiskeypalians, where with every four there was always a fifth.)

Evidently the churches of the Frigidaire have suffered the same fate as the appliances, except that there isn’t a lot of choice to keep the food cold while dropping out of church doesn’t have the same immediate impact as losing a refrigerator/freezer full of food. There are two basic reasons for this, and I’ve documented them before:

1. They abandoned what core beliefs they had to start with: When Church Becomes Pointless
2. They were no longer the “way up” in society: My Thoughts on “Christianity’s Decline in the Northeast” (which partially explains why, if there’s a liberal Main Line church that’s doing okay, it’s in the South)

So the Evangelicals should be dancing a jig, right? They’re not, and not only because they’re against dancing (or were) but because, while the occupants of the Main Line churches were quiet in their constant temperature environment, they were subject to “pre-evangelisation” and “pre-discipleship,” which saved Evangelical churches a lot of time and effort when they finally came forward. Now these churches are faced with presenting the Gospel and actually making disciples from people who, instead of having sat all their lives in the cold, have come out of a vacuum. This has especially hit hard for churches like the Southern Baptists who, buttressed by their idea of unconditional election, have been playing a numbers game, which has worked until recent years.

There’s no doubt that the “civic religion” of the Main Line of past times was good for the country in general if it wasn’t the best for the salvation of individuals. But Evangelical Christianity it by itself not well suited to run a country. Face it: if that were the case, Mike Huckabee would have been in the White House and not in Jerusalem, working for Donald Trump.

Note on Roman Catholicism: they’ve not really held steady in the sense that “they’re holding on to their base” as much as they’ve swapped parishioners, from Gringos to largely Hispanics, which explains their take on immigration better than anything else.