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It’s a New Year, and the beginning of another year when the “smart set” (to use an old expression) goes after Evangelical Christianity. They even have a movie waiting in the wings as we gear up for yet another grueling Presidential election year. The spectre of Evangelical Churches “taking America back for God” with all that goes with that haunts these people, even though after forty years of political activity the Evangelicals don’t have a lot to show for it.

Some of us, though, who in past times limited our ingestion of brain-cell killing substances, have a problem. We remember the time when the Main Line churches—those bastions of proper religion—ruled the roost in our culture, and the Evangelicals were those impecunious souls across the tracks. As Richard Niebuhr put it a little more professionally:

The primary distinction to be made here is that between the church and the sect, of which the former is a natural social group akin to the family or the nation while the latter is a voluntary association. The difference has been well described as lying primarily in the fact that members are born into the church while they must join the sect…

In Protestant history, the sect has ever been the child of an outcast minority, taking its rise in the religious revolts of the poor, of those who were without effective representation in church or state and who formed their conventicles of dissent in the only way open to them, on the democratic, associational pattern.

Let’s start by doing the most dangerous thing one can do with an American audience: state the obvious. The Main Line churches had some issues which need to be frankly admitted. The first of those was the lack of overt state support. Unlike their European counterparts/ancestors, American Main Line churches shed their official status, mostly as a result of the First Amendment (although that didn’t formally apply to the states until after the Civil War.) That in turn deprived them of state sanction and support. In Europe that made the task of any non-state churches an uphill battle, although in the long run it has proven suicidal for Christianity in general. But a quick survey of the impressive edifices Main Line churches have built (like this one) and the broad impact they have had on the culture should inform us that the Main Line churches have overcome this impediment very nicely, thank you.

The second is that there were and are Trojan horses in the Main Line scheme of things. The most prominent of them for a long time were the Methodists. The children of both revivalist Christianity and Anglicanism, until recently they housed a truly diverse collection of social classes and people, more so than any Christian group outside of Roman Catholicism. In the long run, however, the most successful Trojan horse was the Southern Baptist one. Its rise to prominence was, in good Scots-Irish fashion, a product of winning the battle by losing it. It (and the Baptist groups that split off from it) became a substitute government for the one lost with the Confederacy, as evidenced by the enormous amount of literature out there on “Baptist polity.” The South went into a century of poverty and isolation after the Civil War, an ideal climate for developing a culturally dominant religion unhindered by the modernist storm taking place elsewhere (more about that in a moment.)

The third was that, while Niebuhr was right in noting the difference in being born into a church vs. joining a sect, the requirement of conscious joining has the effect of raising the commitment level of the membership. The best precedent for that in American culture is the Masonic Lodge, the model of the civic organisations that have dominated American life for so many years. You can in fact have an organisation that is both respectable and requires people to join it as conscious adults. “To be one ask one” has been their slogan for many years, and even though the Lodge’s impact isn’t what it used to be it has left its mark.

That leads us to one of the Main Line’s biggest advantages: respectability. Americans are obsessed with respectability, which is linked with their obsession with “moving up.” This was especially true after World War II, and the history of churches like the Episcopal one, which experienced serious growth in this time, is a testament to the importance of respectability. The fact that Main Line churches have seriously squandered this in the last half century should put the lie to the idea that Evangelical churches have “muscled in” on their turf; the Main Line churches created a vacuum into which Evangelicals have simply rushed in to fill.

Main Line churches also had the advantage of being the church of the “Old Country,” and in a nation of immigrants that wasn’t something to be gainsaid. How quickly that was shed depended upon the ethnic group, but that’s an advantage that shouldn’t be minimised.

So how did the Main Line churches go into the decline the way they did? Had the Main Line churches more aggressively used their advantages, they could have easily slowed or stopped their own fall, either absolutely or relative to the Evangelicals. But they didn’t. Some of that was due to general trends in the twentieth century, but two trends in particular made it clear that Main Line churches somewhere “lost the plot.”

The first was the intrusion of Modernism into the seminaries, especially as that related to Biblical scholarship. Having jettisoned long ago the Patristic hermeneutic which addressed many of the same issues posed by science and theodicy, they were unprepared for the pseudoscientific higher criticism of the Germans which turned the Scriptures from proof texts to disproof texts. That in turn corroded the confidence of the ministers in their own faith, a corrosion in the warmer waters of the seminary that was more rapid than the colder seas of the parish and the laity. Ultimately the Main Line churches experienced a form of global warming where everyone’s corrosion was accelerated and church became pointless for many.

The second was the whole “social justice” movement in the church. There are so many things obviously wrong with this—after years of touting their respectability and success, a social justice movement didn’t make a lot of sense, for starters—but more than one generation of laity has been accused of being the perpetrators of social injustices. I’ve always thought that the social justice movement was, in part, the product of a underpaid clergy doing a “shadow revolt” against a well-heeled laity. Ultimately, as was the case with their Catholic counterparts, the social justice warriors never realised that the “preferential option for the poor” and the “preferential option of the poor” weren’t the same, or they would have migrated to the Pentecostal churches, only to discover that they had a different view altogether of how to right the wrongs of society.

So what are the takeaways from all this? I think there are two.

The first is that the Main Line churches could have put up a better fight than they did against the intrusion of Evangelical ones. They had the resources and they had the numbers but used neither of these. They never took their Evangelical competitors seriously until it was too late. Now we have a whole cadre of people who have made careers out of lamenting the problems of Evangelical churches, but much of this was avoidable. It is more profitable to place the blame on—and learn the lessons from—the failures rather than always curse the successes.

The second—and the reason why the first happened—is because the Main Line churches didn’t put up the fight as they had lost the plot—they quit believing in their own mission. Having done that, it was only a matter of time before someone would come in to fill the vacuum, and someone did.

While the Main Line’s current woes are an interesting and important topic by themselves, there’s a greater lesson to be learned. One thing I’ve discovered in following the Episcopal Church’s woes for the last quarter century is that institutions like TEC are microcosms of the culture at large. The sad truth is that the West in general has lost the plot and no longer believes in what made it the success it has been. There is no reason to believe that the West will fare any better than the Main Line churches, especially since it’s up against opponents that have a lot more going for them than American Evangelicals. If that conflict ends the way I think it will, all the whining and fulminations of Evangelicals’ opponents be irrelevant, and not having learned the lessons will be fatal to Main Line and West alike.