520 - American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future

American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future

By Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney

New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1987. 279 Pp. $27.00 ($10.00 Pb).

This is state of the art information and analysis. With its publication, the discussion of the changes it addresses has changed. I will be surprised if, among students of religion and culture in America, there is not frequent reference to "Roof and McKinney" in the years ahead. By mainline religion, the authors say at the outset, they mean "the, dominant, culturally established faiths held by the majority of Americans." Toward the end of the book, they say that "mainline" refers to "religious groups that identify with and contribute to the definition of the society's core values." However defined, they leave no doubt that the mainline definitely is not limited to-and maybe does not even include much of-what used to be called the mainline, and is now, with considerable justice, referred to as the oldline.

Through painstaking analysis of survey research and other data, the authors conclude that the pattern described by Dean Kelley in 1972 (Why Conservative Churches are Growing) has accelerated and intensified and is not likely to be reversed in the foreseeable future. According to their suggestive arrangement of religious "families," half the American population is about evenly divided between Roman Catholic and "Moderate Protestant" (Methodist, Lutheran, Disciples, Northern Baptist, Reformed); nearly sixteen percent are in the growing family called Conservative Protestant (the evangelical, fundamentalist, and pentecostal groups); nine percent are black Baptists or Methodists; about nine percent belong to a declining "Liberal Protestantism" (Episcopalian, UCC, Presbyterian); and seven percent are in the impressively expanding category of the unaffiliated. One can quarrel over which Protestants belong where in this scheme of "families," but Roof and McKinney offer persuasive empirical evidence of the religious, cultural, and social correlations supporting their scheme of Liberal, Moderate, and Conservative.

It is no criticism of this study to say that at many points it simply confirms what some other observers of the religious situation have been saying for some time. Roof and McKinney have subjected observations, intuitions, and hypotheses to empirical sociological testing and have come up with a systematic design that is lucid and, for the most part, convincing. Among the many factors contributing to what they describe as the deep and continuing "depression" of liberal Protestantism, they

521 - American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future

highlight two that are frequently neglected. The "switching" from other groups, which was once a major factor in sustaining the high status liberal churches, has dramatically declined as conservative and moderate churches have become more "respectable" and, in many regions of the country, the socio-religious elite. And those who are still switching to the liberal churches evidence a lower level of commitment, which is probably related to the fact that the many who are leaving the liberal churches typically are not going to conservative churches but are joining the swelling ranks of the religiously unaffiliated.

This is a richly detailed and reasoned study. The margins of my copy are littered with dozens of question marks, explanation points, and scribbled notes for possible alternative explanations of the phenomena so well described. But even my objections bear witness to the suggestiveness of this work. From now on, it will be hard to take seriously analysts of the religious and cultural situation who have not attended to this book.

RICHARD J. NEUHAUS

Center on Religion and Society
New York, N.Y.