Without a Prayer

...Despite their demographic decline, mainliners are still disproportionately represented in Congress, in local political offices, in corporate boardrooms, and in other places of influence...

...Albert Mohler, head of the Southern Baptist seminary in Louisville, is understandably pleased that his church did not follow mainline patterns, and now counts 15,000 students in its staunchly conservative seminaries...

...His funeral sermon for one of the victims was broadcast internationally, and unapolo-getically faulted Satan for the murderous spree, while inviting grieving listeners to turn to Jesus...

...They are not interested in a pale substitute, because it can never satisfy...

...Still reeling from their denomination's schism since the election of the first openly homosexual bishop two years ago, the Episcopalians are understandably adamant about this...

...All now are increasingly marginal, Shiflett insists, with good reason...

...Rather than turn their backs on religion, as has much of Europe and Canada, Americans creatively found solace in new megachurches or in robust versions of ancient churches once considered exotic...

...Shiflett also may be overly pessimistic...

...Neither liberalism nor secularism is necessarily on the rise...

...If the atheists conquer, they will marginalize the Christians to the extent of imprisonment and death," warns Father John McCloskey, who has led a host of prominent converts such as Judge Robert Bork and columnist Robert Novak into Roman Catholicism...

...Shiflett's thesis, that liberal religion stifles churches, can be proven not just by comparing mainliners to nonmain-liners, but also by looking within the mainline...

...Meanwhile, there are some limited but hopeful signs of mainline revival...

...Conservative Methodists and Anglicans in Africa have become important allies for conservatives left in the American churches...

...And they have been doing it for 40 years...

...In contrast to the sunny optimism about America that mainline Protestants often exuded throughout the decades of their dominance, the conservative religious converts that Shif-lett profiles, though joyful in their own faith, are often pessimists about the country...

...Georgia Methodism is conservative and growing...

...All of Shiflett's converts celebrate their faith in what much of mainline Protestantism abandoned: belief in divine revelation, miracles, an afterlife of Heaven or Hell, and unchanging notions of right and wrong...

...But in Exodus: Why Americans Are Fleeing Liberal Churches for Conservative Christianity, Dave Shiflett fleshes out the trend by examining the spiritual journeys of several pilgrims...

...Himself a somewhat equivocal Presbyterian, Shiflett anecdotally relates how liberal Protestantism, once America's dominant religious force, is exhausted, spiritually, politically, and demographically...

...Lutherans and Presbyterians, with still numerous conservative local synods and presbyteries, have also yet to follow the Episcopalians over the cliff...

...Andrew Ferguson, who realized he was the only believer in God as he was studying for the ministry at a liberal seminary in Berkeley, now finds peace in "submission" to the Roman Catholic Church...

...Shiflett's work is helpful...

...The global south progeny of mainline missionaries may yet rescue at least parts of their parent churches...

...But surveys show that millions of mainliners still adhere to traditional Christian beliefs...

...Once known as the Republican party at prayer, the Episcopal Church has devolved into a hodgepodge of vegans, sandal-wearers, and Greenpeaceniks...

...People want the real thing," Colson explained about liberal Protestantism and its vapid emphasis on good works instead of supernatural truth...

...And unlike their often leftist clerics, these mainliners still mostly vote Republican...

...The pilgrims he traces—Weekly Standard writer and senior editor Andrew Ferguson, writer Frederica Matthewes-Green, conservative publisher Al Regnery, Southern Baptist leaders Albert Mohler and Richard Land, former Nixon aide Charles Colson, and an evangelical preacher who was present at the Columbine shootings, respectively found peace in Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Baptist conserva-tivism, and evangelicalism...

...Or at least that's the stereotype...

...Shiflett concludes by telling of former Pol Pot followers in Cambodia who are converting to evangelicalism...

...Communism is dead, but the old-time religion, though repackaged, is doing just fine...

...Instead, they steadfastly adhere to their own traditions and peculiar rituals, and are intentionally counter-cultural...

...Bill Oudemolen, a megachurch evangelical pastor in Littleton, Colorado, was on site when two teenagers murdered their classmates at Columbine High School...

...Meanwhile, Baptists and evangelicals and Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, all of whom were once considered to be on the sideline of American society, are now bustling along at a brisk pace...

...palians," Shiflett cracks, mocking what used to be America's most refined and upwardly mobile of religions...

...Liberal theology prevailed in the mainline churches a century ago...

...Perhaps missing from Shiflett's overview is a great sense of sadness about the demise of the mainline, which almost singlehandedly created America's notions of civic righteousness and providential destiny...

...There may now be twice as many lesbians in the United States as EpiscoMark D. Tooley directs the United Methodist project at the Institute on Religion and Democracy...

...This is hardly news...

...In American religion, as in global religion, it is conservative believers who are growing in numbers and in cultural influence...

...Three centuries of cultural hegemony ensure that even a declining mainline will not die anytime soon...

...The mainline churches, whose adherents largely founded America and led it for much of 300 years, became boring and irrelevant...

...Meanwhile, stodgy old mainline sermons about social justice are preached to mostly empty pews and a dwindling number of gray heads...

...In a way, it is a triumph of American consumerism...

...And as Shiflett notes, global Christianity, like American Christianity, is increasingly dominated by orthodox, conservative beliefs...

...There are now more United Methodists in Georgia alone than in California, Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada combined...

...Those crazy Episcopalians, along with the United Methodist, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A), Evangelical Lutheran, United Church of Christ, American Baptist, and Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) denominations once comprised the "seven sisters" of America's religious mainline...

...Fellow evangelical Chuck Colson turned his Watergate infamy into a vastly successful prison ministry that made him one of America's most prominent religious voices...

...West Coast Methodism is liberal and collapsing...

...According to one of Shiflett's experts, these successful churches do not strive to be reasonable, tolerant, ecumenical, or relevant...

...Frederica Matthewes-Green proudly showed Shiflett the slice of a saint's foot bone that she maintains as a relic in her unashamedly Orthodox home...

...It just doesn't answer the questions people have...

...The United Methodist Church, with 8 million members in the United States and the largest of the mainliners, has decidedly turned in a more conservative direction on some bellwether issues such as homosexuality...

...Fewer than 15 percent of American church members now belong to these bodies...

...All the pilgrims, especially former Episcopalians Ferguson and Matthewes-Green, insist that mainline Protestantism is dead...

...Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist church's agency for social witness, rejoices in the biblical inerrancy championed by the conservatives who took the helm of his denomination nearly 25 years ago...

...But instead of boding ill for mainlin-ers, this may actually save them...

...These convictions, so profoundly subversive to the spirit of the age, transform lives...