Episcopalians looking to evangelize

[Tartarus Sauce]

The ongoing collapse of Mainline denominations is one of the more underappreciated factors fueling polarization along religious/secular lines in America. Christianity is increasingly being viewed as an all or nothing affair, making it harder for softer approaches to gain traction. It's also reflective of the more general decline of civil institutions, considering how many were built and reared off Mainline traditions, and how many of them now rot on the vine as we become increasingly isolated and disengaged in the modern, tech-fueled world.

Adding to their woes, Evangelicals have been eager to erect institutions wholly separate from their Mainline brethren, and happily pick off members and fold them into their own congregations. Thus, Mainliners have been squeezed from both sides, competing for membership with Evangelicals (and losing that competition) while shedding others into the ranks of the unaffiliated. Meanwhile, secular forces have begun displacing the role the Mainline elite used to play within American society, including within many institutions they formerly nurtured.

This trend has exacerbated the social and political divisions between the devotees of Christianity and the unaffiliated, as many American Christians inculcate themselves in institutions and mindsets separate from and opposed to the secular world, while the increasing number of those never reared within the culture of Christianity find its paradigms foreign and inhospitable. Without a flourishing stable of Mainliners to bridge the gap between the two, mutual antipathies will only deepen, and American society will continue to segregate along rigid social lines with few cross-cutting cleavages.