The death of Mainline Protestantism should be a lesson

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If Ernest Hemingway were to interview American Mainline Protestantism in 2025, the conversation would go something like this: “How did you go spiritually bankrupt?” “Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.”

There seems little doubt that we are now approaching that second, sudden phase. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has this year closed its foreign mission agency. This move is a sign of the denomination’s financial struggles, but it is also the logical outworking of the kind of squeamishness about missionary work that the religious pluralism of the PCUSA engenders.

Additionally, an article by Chris Mondics in the Spectator World’s August edition details how progressivism has hollowed out the institutions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, focusing in p