To those in the know: How much of the "mainline Protestant decline/conservative and/or evangelical Protestant increase" can be attributed to differences in birth rates between the two categories of Protestants?
How much can be attributed to better (or rather, much more aggressive) evangelical outreach to minorities and the "unchurched"?
What about mainliners leaving for more conservative and/or evangelical churches (or alternately, leaving the church altogether, for whatever reason-I suspect, based on anecdotes of living in the SF Bay Area, a lot more liberals than conservatives fall into that latter group
)
Finally, how much is this also a matter of mainline churches tending to being older (both in terms of denominations and in terms of congregants
) than evangelical churches?
I believe all of these contribute, but I'm curious to see what accounts for the bulk of the differences, or which is the most significant factor.
