A reformed theologian gives his thoughts on Osteen here, and they may surprise you. It surprised me a bit.
@Eddie
Actually, I think it does speak to your point. Your description of liberal churches experiencing a drop in their membership while evangelical churches were growing was true in the past. However, as the chart on the first page of the Pew Forum’s data shows, evangelical churches have declined more slowly in the past 7 years, but they are declining just like mainline Protestant and Catholic churches. It is already happening to evangelical churches, and I don’t think you can attribute it to the fact that they suddenly became more liberal in the past 7 years. I also don’t think you can describe the drop in any of the branches of American Christianity as a “free fall,” but it certainly should alarm all of us that the number of people who claim affiliation with any brand of Christianity fell from 78% to 71% in such a short time (2007-14). If this trend continues unabated, many, many evangelical churches will stand half empty in a generation or two.
Forgive me, but I think you’ve been sold a bill of goods. I don’t exempt myself, because I bought the same line of reasoning from some of the same conservative leaders of the evangelical movement. The reason is that it sounds plausible. Yes, the mainline denominations were declining for a long time while evangelical denominations and non-denominational churches were growing. Why? As you asked: What keeps membership up and growing?
You focus on homosexual bishops, the new sexual morality, and lax morals in general as explanations for the drop in mainline denominations. The trend of membership losses started in the '60s. The ordination of homosexual bishops and arguments about same-sex marriage are of too recent vintage to have played a part in the overall trend of losses. (The Episcopal Church did not start losing membership in the 1960s because of a gay bishop ordained in 2003.) The sexual revolution, on the other hand, certainly could have been a factor, but I don’t think we can blame the losses in church membership entirely on that.
A 1993 article in First Things attempts to wrestle with the issue, although from a somewhat dated perspective, since evangelical churches were still experiencing growth at that time. Here’s a quick summary of the findings (italics mine):
"The first step toward identifying these special factors was the discovery, in the late 1970s, that the principal source of the decline was the tendency of many adolescents who had been confirmed in these denominations from the early 1960s on to drop out of church and not return. … To gain new insights into the reasons for the decline, the three of us decided to interview a national sample of baby boomers who had been confirmed in mainline Protestant churches during the 1960s. To simplify our task, we concentrated on a single denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA)…
"Our findings cast doubt on most of the popular theories about the decline of mainline churches. We were mildly surprised to learn that participation in countercultural activities is only weakly correlated to church participation today. Involvement in the counterculture is associated with unorthodox theological views, as well as with liberal positions on controversial issues of sexuality, reproduction, and gender, but it is not a good predictor of church involvement itself. Similarly, the amount of formal education has no bearing on how active one is in church. The handful of confirmands in our sample who have earned Ph.D.'s tend to be irreligious, but exposure to a college education does not serve to explain mainline church decline. Our fundamentalists, for example, were as well educated as any of the other groups in the sample. Most of those who lost their faith, or who adopted unorthodox opinions, did so before, not after, going to college. College may not strengthen faith, but for most baby boomers it did not initiate doubt.
"When we asked our sample of confirmands why they had dropped out of church we found virtually no support either for the theory that the church has become “socially irrelevant” or for the theory that church decline represents a protest against the radical agenda of denominational elites.
"In our study, the single best predictor of church participation turned out to be belief-orthodox Christian belief, and especially the teaching that a person can be saved only through Jesus Christ. Virtually all our baby boomers who believe this are active members of a church. Among those who do not believe it, some are active in varying degrees; a great many are not. Ninety-five percent of the drop-outs who describe themselves as religious do not believe it. And amazingly enough, fully 68 percent of those who are still active Presbyterians don’t believe it either.… But we also discovered a pattern in the theological views of people who, on the Gallup-style theological questions, seemed to pick and choose their responses in unorthodox ways. We have named this pattern the theology of lay liberalism. It is “liberal” because its defining characteristic is the rejection of the view that Christianity is the only religion with a valid claim to truth. It is “lay” because it does not reflect any of the theological systems contained in the writings or seminary lectures of today’s post-orthodox Christian intellectuals. Our interviewees did not speak the language of liberation theology, feminist theology, or the theology of Presbyterian General Assembly pronouncements. Lay liberalism does borrow from the views of certain dead intellectuals, but it is largely a homemade product, a kind of modern-age folk religion…
"From our interviews, we formed the firm impression that for many lay liberals the principal value of churches is that they support basic morality. This may be one reason why 96 percent of the “religious” unchurched and even 71 percent of the agnostics want their children to have a religious education. Lay liberals do not care what theological views their children embrace or whether they attend church when they grow up, but they do want them to become “good people.”
“What did the Presbyterian Church itself contribute to the spiritual formation of these baby boomers? For some, it contributed a great deal, especially if their parents were highly committed Christians themselves. But for many others, Sunday School, worship services, confirmation classes, and youth programs did not produce a commitment sufficiently strong to sustain itself in a milieu of family and peers in which religion was rarely mentioned. To be effective, even the best-conceived program of religious education needs the reinforcement of a rich discursive follow-up in a circle of strong believers. Two or three hours a week of “God talk” is hardly enough.”
According to the data, the single biggest predictor of remaining within the church is belief that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. People don’t leave the faith because the churches don’t preach strong morality; they leave because they no longer believe in Jesus as the only savior.
And if the problem appeared with the Baby Boomers interviewed 23 years ago, it has only worsened with the Millennials today. The Pew Forum attributes the recent trend of across-the-board decline to generational replacement:
“One of the most important factors in the declining share of Christians and the growth of the “nones” is generational replacement. As the Millennial generation enters adulthood, its members display much lower levels of religious affiliation, including less connection with Christian churches, than older generations. Fully 36% of young Millennials (those between the ages of 18 and 24) are religiously unaffiliated, as are 34% of older Millennials (ages 25-33). And fewer than six-in-ten Millennials identify with any branch of Christianity, compared with seven-in-ten or more among older generations, including Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers. Just 16% of Millennials are Catholic, and only 11% identify with mainline Protestantism. Roughly one-in-five are evangelical Protestants.”