I don’t know how my grandparents voted. I don’t even know how to describe their political views. My dad and best friend don’t agree on just about anything in national politics. And growing up in a mainline church during the 1980s and ’90s, I couldn’t tell you anything I heard or learned about politicians or positions over 18 years in the same congregation with a series of Methodist preachers.

So that makes my upbringing a model for what data scientist Ryan Burge commends in his new book, The Vanishing Church. Ryan grew up in a conservative Southern Baptist church and attended a Christian college, but compared the doctrinal assurance he saw in others, he doubted. Nevertheless, at age 23, Ryan began to lead a mainline American Baptist congregation in Mount Vernon, Illinois, alongside his continued academic studies and teaching. The self-described “least successful Baptist pastor in history,” Ryan oversaw the church’s closure in 2024 after nearly 20 years of decline. Ryan writes, then, not only of the overall diminishing of moderate congregations—replaced by more uniformly evangelical churches—but of his own church vanishing.

If you’re younger than Ryan and me, you might not even remember much about mainline Protestantism, which dominated American religious life for much of the late-19th and 20th centuries. You might think of church as something for conservative people. Or if you still see mainline churches in your neighborhood, you might assume they’re liberal. When I went to college more than 25 years ago I was surprised to see every Methodist church flying the rainbow flag of gay pride on their signs. Yet as Ryan points out, in several mainline denominations, the majority still vote Republican. They’re just closer to politically balanced when compared to the much more numerous evangelical groupings.   

Ryan shows how the disappearance of moderate mainline congregations contributes to our cultural and political polarization. I agree that when we don’t know and see friends on the other side of issues, we’re more likely to demonize as we divide. But as a child of the mainline who made the opposite move as Ryan by becoming an evangelical in my teen years, I see two problems common to such laments. First, Ryan focuses on the conservative consolidation and growth of evangelical churches without sufficient attention to the sharp left turn among mainline leadership, especially with sexuality, starting in the 1960s. Methodist seminaries increasingly sent liberal pastors into moderate and conservative congregations, with the effect of pushing many conservatives into evangelical alternatives.

Second, Ryan worries that with fewer mainline churches, moderates who don’t see doctrine in black and white aren’t able to find a congregational home. They’re stuck with nothing or trying to bite their tongue in evangelical churches. I’ve seen that phenomenon in churches I’ve helped to lead, and over time that tension doesn’t usually hold. The moderates choose to leave rather than stay and disagree with their church on homosexuality or women in leadership.

When they leave, they don’t lack for alternatives. Options may be limited in some small towns and rural areas (they’re still abundant in the Midwestern farming communities where I grew up). But I don’t know many suburban or urban areas lacking in a variety of moderate, liberal, and proudly progressive mainline churches, sometimes with considerable endowments and beautiful, historic facilities in prime locations. Yet those churches, to the point of Ryan’s book, don’t seem to be thriving. In the American religious marketplace, there’s still too much supply for the lackluster demand. They haven’t yet vanished. But they’re headed that way.

Doubters should always be welcome to work through those questions in our churches. And I don’t think evangelical churches pushing partisan activism, especially now, are helping Christianity or culture. But I don’t wonder why mainline churches that show little confidence in Scripture, or even actively teach against it, are vanishing. I grew up that way, and until an unexpected encounter with Jesus at age 15, I couldn’t wait to leave Christianity behind. Not many from my elder millennial cohort stayed. They mostly vanished—unsure why they needed the church’s vague weekly reminders to be a nice and decent person.

In my mainline Methodist church, men sometimes promoted a ministry called Walk to Emmaus. Usually, these participants stood out for their evangelical spirituality, compared to the more common moralism we heard from the pulpit. While I couldn’t relate to them at the time, I still remember these men from my church by name. The original two unnamed men on their way to Emmaus saw Jesus vanish as soon as they recognized him. “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road,” they said to each other, “while he opened to us the Scriptures?” (Luke 24:32). I fail to see any other hope if we don’t want the church to vanish in our generation. Until Jesus returns, he’ll always be living and active among those who trust his Word—among those who, like the disciple Thomas, find healing from sin by touching the wounds of the risen Christ.