One Sunday, Ryan Burge looked out over his Mount Vernon, Illinois, church as the pianist played the service’s prelude. The American Baptist part-time pastor counted nine people in the sanctuary, including himself. Nine, total. The tiny head count was a shock to Burge but soon enough became the norm. In 2024, the church finally closed, its 156-year history ending with a small service. A local Methodist church sent a flower arrangement, fresh blooms like those at all the weddings and funerals held in Burge’s church over generations.

Over his lifetime, Burge has served as paid staff at three Baptist churches. Two have closed. The third is 80 percent smaller than when he was there two decades ago. Burge is no grim reaper of church closure. He happens to have presided over mainline Protestant churches during a period in which roughly 40 million Americans quit attending church. Those who did remain churchgoers over these years often veered toward more politically and culturally conservative faith communities.

Burge was left standing in the middle as American belief polarized away from him and other moderate believers.

It just so happens that Burge was also among those most equipped to analyze the erasure of America’s religious middle. The part-time pastor is also one of America’s preeminent religion number crunchers, a political scientist at the John C. Danforth Center at Washington University, St. Louis, and author of five books about religion (and irreligion) in the United States. His latest, The Vanishing Church, is about the hollowing out of moderate congregations.

It isn’t just the heartbreak of his own church’s collapse that nags at Burge. It’s the broader trends of which his church was one part, making it a data point for how the Christian right’s more extreme influence bifurcated American religion and relationships. Mainline churches, which Burge notes once represented much higher degrees of American political, ideological, and economic mixing, are disappearing as Americans shift to the extremes.

In the 1950s, more than half of Americans were associated with mainline churches, also known as the “Seven Sisters” of mainline Protestantism: the United Methodist Church, Episcopal Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, Presbyterian Church (USA), United Church of Christ, American Baptist Church, and Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Burge describes what used to be a common scene: a thriving house of worship with factory workers taking communion right after lawyers and doctors; little kids sitting a row ahead of elders in their nineties; near-even odds of sitting next to a Republican or a Democrat.

Through the 1970s, large swaths of Americans belonged to these mainline churches, but according to General Social Survey data, that cross-section of Americans has been thinning out for decades. By the early 1990s, only 19 percent of Americans were mainline Protestants. By 2022, the figure had dropped to 9 percent.

Those who remain in these churches tend to be older. As Burge notes, since 2017 Episcopal priests have conducted more burials than baptisms. While a third of Presbyterian Church (USA) members are over 70 years of age, only 4 percent are children under 18. Time is not on the side of mainline churches.

Today’s hollowed-out mainline churches are a remnant of the 1980s religious and political culture shifts. According to Burge’s research, as recently as 1984, 50 percent of white evangelicals were Democrats; 40 percent were Republicans. But throughout the Reagan years, as the Christian right grew in political prominence and became synonymous with evangelicalism, the portion of Democrats began to shrink. The portion of Republicans grew among white evangelicals after Barack Obama’s election, reaching 49 percent by 2010, then 55 percent in 2016, and on up to 63 percent by 2002.

There’s a danger in “over-romanticizing ‘moderate’ spaces in the past,” notes Brian Kaylor, a Baptist........

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