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The New Mainline
| Article
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13937 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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2 / 1988 |
2,326 Words |
| Author
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George Weigel
George Weigel, a Roman Catholic theologian, is president of
the Washington-based James Madison Foundation and the editor
of American Purpose. His most recent book is Tranquillitas
Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American
Catholic Thought on War and Peace. |
AMERICAN MAINLINE RELIGION
Its Changing Shape and Future
Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987
279 pp., $27 cloth, $10 paper
The very term mainline religion conveys a sense of stability--theological, cultural, demographic--that ill fits the evidence in Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney's important study of the ways in which American religion is getting sorted out at the end of the twentieth century. For if there could be one, admittedly vulgarized, but all-purpose summary of the Clark and Roof findings, it would be this: The old mainline, she ain't what she used to be.
By mainline religion, we unusually mean those great Protestant churches--Episcopal, Congregationalist (now United Church of Christ), Presbyterian, and Methodist--that for two hundred years or more took the basic task of culture-formation in the American democratic experiment as a matter of historically-validated divine right (although they would, latterly, never think of putting it that way). Now, as Roof and McKinney make empirically clear beyond all argument, the mainline--the churches with primary responsibility for the moral culture of the United States--has shifted in ways that portend a feisty future for American religion.
The authors begin by summarizing several of the most recent trends that illustrate the "depths of the changes now underway" on the American religious scene:
"The privileged Protestant mainline has fallen upon hard times and no longer enjoys the influence and power it once had.
"Conservative Protestants are flourishing and are now much more culture affirming than they used to be.
"Roman Catholic leadership has assumed a new position in the center and is articulating a social vision to its constituency and the public at large.
"American Jews seem to have experienced a shift in outlook--more concerned now with group interests and survival and less with assimilation.
"Black religionists are now holding a more inclusive
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