(CN) — On Independence Day, Belinda Kleeberger finally broke free.
The 66-year-old grandmother had only ever known her American Baptist church in small-town Maine. She had attended services there for six decades and was a leader in the church.
Kleeberger saw right-leaning political rhetoric grow there for the last few years, but the Fourth of July service was too much.
“Now it seems Jesus sat down with the Founding Fathers and helped them write the Constitution,” Kleeberger said. “I need a Jesus that transcends all that.”
She told her pastor that she needed to find another way. The conversation wasn’t easy, considering the pastor is Kleeberger’s sister-in-law.
Carolyn Wilkinson departed from her Southern Baptist Convention church in 2016.
Wilkinson had worshipped and studied many Western and Eastern disciplines; she was once a practicing Wiccan. Her fellow churchgoers wouldn’t let go of her past.
“No matter what, I was always going to be Carolyn the Witch,” the 54-year-old Maryland resident said.
Kleeberger and Wilkinson are part of a growing exodus from white evangelicalism.
White mainline Protestants now outnumber white Evangelicals, according to an extensive survey released July 8 by the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit polling organization.
Mainline Protestant churches — such as the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Episcopal Church — do not consider themselves evangelical or “born-again.” These groups tend to be more liberal and moderate in their doctrinal interpretations, and especially on social justice topics including same-sex marriage and abortion, compared to their evangelical counterparts, which include the Southern Baptist Convention, the Salvation Army and the Wesleyan Church.
“I don’t know when this would have last been the case, at least 70 or 80 years, the percentage of Americans who are white Evangelicals is smaller than the percentage of Americans who are white and more moderate to liberal Protestants,” said Diana Butler Bass, historian of Christianity and author of the 2021 book “Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence.”
While many factors politically and socially may be fueling this shift, the ramifications for faith and politics may be profound.
MORAL MINORITY?
Fueled by Jerry Falwell Sr.’s “Moral Majority” organization, the U.S. evangelical movement boomed in the 1980s, tying many American Protestants to the Republican Party. The Christian Right sprang up and became a vital voting base behind conservatives’ political successes.
At the same time, the number of mainline Protestants dipped, leading to many church closures.
Butler Bass, who has a doctorate in religious studies from Duke University, said the numbers started reversing shortly after 9/11. She believes the conservative evangelicals’ rejection of LGBTQ rights and a growing political disconnect, especially with young people, has fueled the shift.
“You can see that it’s true, because of the way evangelicalism have been acting,” Butler Bass said. “They’ll say, ‘Oh, we’re the biggest group around. Liberals are declining. We’re true so you know our churches grow. God blesses us.’ But then, on the other hand, they’re acting in this really paranoid and persecuted way. And they know, internally, and they talk about it, how people are not joining churches anymore. How people are leaving. How young adults are leaving.”
But not all are convinced that there has been a complete flip.
Daniel Williams, author of “The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship” and a historian at the University of West Georgia, noted that other studies have shown that, while a significant number has left evangelism, enough new members have joined to keep the numbers relatively stable. He holds that many evangelicals are hesitant to be identified as such because of the “objectional politics that they see in Evangelicalism.”
Follow @@joeharris_stl
