From the beginning, Stark and Finke define mainline churches (including us in the ELCA) as those religious communities who are not in significant tension with the culture. Cults, on the other hand, are religious communities who are in tension with the dominant culture. Mainline churches are failing, say the authors, because they have become secularized or tamed by the culture. Mainline churches try to cartel or control people but fail in a free religious economy.

The near-sainted Lutheran historians, Martin Marty and Sidney Ahlstrom, are criticized in this book as being typical of historians of the mainline who have ignored (or minimized) the rise of evangelical growth and the rise of Roman Catholicism. In other words, elite historians are snobs. I wonder if that is true of elite sociologists?

The seeds of mainline church decline can be found in18th and 19th century when those churches refused to move west in the U.S. because of low, or no salaries, for pastors and preachers there. The clergy gap was picked up by non-educated clerics who were bivocational and tended to be anabaptist or, in the 18th century, Methodist. This failure to follow the immigration patterns was a huge mistake for the mainline churches and sealed their historic fate, says Finke and Stark.

It has been assumed that Catholics who immigrated from Europe were just assimilated into American Catholic Churches and continued their vigorous European piety! Wrong, says the authors. The immigrant Catholics were largely nominal, even indifferent to Catholicism back home in Europe, and were "evangelized" by the American Catholic Church in an intense campaign fed by evangelical passion, Protestant anti-Catholicism, ethnic discrimination and a tremendous system of parochial schools. This makes sense even if you think of Norwegian Lutheran immigration. While almost all Norwegian immigrants to the U.S. were Lutheran--less than half would eventually join Lutheran Churches. Most Norwegian immigrants were only mildly religious. Catholicism in the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th centuries was an "Irish sect" with Irish control of the episcopacy. The Irish European Church was most evangelical and zealous in the world and transplanted into the American Church. One can make the argument that the "Irish Church" prevails in 2005.

In the late 19th and 20th century, Methodist elites moved left politically/socially and became intensely secularized. Thus, the denomination declined. As pastors became more educated they lost their passion in the preaching of repentance and hell. Incomes and cultural approval for clergy and lay leaders became more important, and numerical decline speeded up. Revival "cults" were spun off of Methodism in the 19th and 20th centuries, and, today, they are separate churches. Declining Methodism was the mother of many sects.

Southern Baptists are involved in 2005 in a huge struggle for the control of their denomination. Moderates (secularists) keep losing battles, and yet the conservatives never seem to prevail. The war continues. Stay tuned. The authors seem to say that if the moderates win--the Southern Baptist Convention will decline.

Finke and Stark are quick to criticize the “top down” ecumenical movement of the post World War II era. The Ecumenical Movement as defined by the National Council of Churches, they believe, is a cartel operation designed to stifle religious impulses. Elites do not represent the people in the pews. The NCC dominated ecumenical movement is doomed to failure since all of these denominations are in numerical decline.

All in all, a challenging book! I think the lesson for me here is that if a church wants to grow, it must give the people a reason to belong--not just cultural conformity. The "other worldness" of the Christian message and the zeal for repentance and passion for worship must be at the center. The authors also say that renewal is possible even in old mainline churches. As a Lutheran bishop in 2005, this book is a somewhat revealing and yet a hopeful picture. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is about 300,000 (6%) members smaller than it was in 1988. Renewal is needed and possible!

Thomas A. Skrenes, Bishop