On Mainline Reconquista and American Renewal
What have American “conservatives” actually succeeded in conserving over the past century? Faith? The Church? Family? Schools? Given the current state of all these areas, the answer is clearly “none of the above.” The uncomfortable truth is that conservative Christians have lost every single cultural battle within living memory. Secular Leftism has succeeded in its long march through society and has captured every major cultural institution. Universities have been converted into Leftist factories, marriage has been replaced with a sexual free-for-all, and religion has been replaced with radical political causes. The fruits of this are clear. Every year, rates of marriage, Church attendance, and religious affiliation decline, while the rates of depression and loneliness skyrocket, especially in the younger generations.
How the Left Conquered Society
Left-wing elites know a secret about society that many modern conservatives unfortunately overlook: cultural change happens through elite institutions. To change a culture, one must capture the mainstream universities, media, and other cultural centers. While conservative Christians have focused on evangelizing individuals, generally those with less cultural influence, the Left has successfully evangelized the centers of culture and exerted top-down influence. Another secret they know is that religion was originally at the heart of the culture and its major institutions. Every Western culture was built on a certain institutional Church. For England, it was the Church of England; for Italy, it was the Roman Catholic Church; and for America, it was the mainline Protestant Churches. Therefore, Leftists have been very intentional in hijacking the most culturally important churches in every Western nation and replacing them with their own ideology.
Mainline Denominations vs Evangelical Offshoots
In the context of Protestant denominations, “mainline” refers to the churches with direct historical and institutional continuity to the churches that American culture was founded on. The old historic Episcopal Church at the center of your average major city, the beautiful local Presbyterian church where performances of Handel’s Messiah are held, or the Methodist Church that runs the largest food pantry in town, all most likely belong to these mainline Protestant denominations, which include, but are not limited to, the PCUSA, the UMC, the ELCA, the UCC, and The Episcopal Church. Not all Protestant Churches are mainline, however. All of the mainline denominations, to varying degrees, have been taken over by theological liberalism over the past hundred years, adopting a watered-down version of the Gospel and an embrace of exclusively left-wing political causes. In response, many smaller, Evangelical denominations have split off from their mainline counterparts in protest, forming denominations like the PCA, the OPC, the ACNA, and most recently the GMC. However, any time these groups split off, they were forced to leave behind their generational resources, including seminaries, endowments, cultural connections, and – often – their historic buildings.
An increasing number of Christians over the years have abandoned denominations altogether, forming new “non-denominational” churches. These churches, along with the Evangelical offshoots, have been relatively successful at winning new members, while the mainline Churches have had a long, steady membership decline. As it stands today, conservative offshoot denominations and non-denominational churches have more growth, but mainline denominations have far more resources and historic, cultural connections.
The Lost Power of the Mainline
Before the mainline denominations got hijacked by liberalism and subsequently began to wither away, they accomplished what modern conservative churches can scarcely dream of. Firstly, they gave each Protestant tradition a united front, whether Presbyterian, Methodist, or Episcopalian, so that large church bodies could address the culture as one voice, rather than a contradictory soup of splintered factions. Secondly, they had the resources to build great cultural institutions such as Yale, Duke and Princeton, which gave them the power to not only influence the culture on an institutional level, but be at the forefront of innovation and positive progress. Thirdly, they were houses for the Christian heritage of society. It is hard for modern Christians to conceive of going to the same church as their great-grandparents, but that was the expected practice before “church shopping” and “church growth” became commonplace. Mainline churches have the names, accomplishments, and works of generations upon generations of faithful Christians literally carved in stone, something that is utterly irreplaceable. The great contemporary Lutheran theologian Dr. Jordan B. Cooper has said that Protestants are absent from modern cultural conversations, while Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians still have a seat at the table, because the established Protestant institutions – the mainline Churches – have largely been lost.
The Faithful Remnant of the Mainline
While large sections of each mainline Protestant denomination have been hijacked by theological liberalism to varying degrees, each mainline denomination also has a strong minority of churches, pastors, and bishops that have stood firm on historic biblical doctrine. The PCUSA has the Fellowship Community, which is a network of theologically conservative churches, including several major ones like National Presbyterian Church D.C. and First Presbyterian Church Hollywood. The Episcopal Church has several conservative Bishops who will not allow same-sex marriage in their diocese, as well as a strong alliance of conservative priests and bishops called Communion Partners. While most conservative United Methodist churches have broken off to form the new Global Methodist denomination, there are a decent handful that have not. Even the UCC, the most liberal denomination in America, has a network of “Faithful and Welcoming” churches, which is the biblical alternative to “Open and Affirming”. While mainline denominations overall are rapidly shrinking, the only churches within these denominations that have not been dying out are the theologically conservative ones.
Operation Reconquista
Seeing our own churches liberalize rapidly while simultaneously bleeding membership has been a call to action for many of us traditional mainline Protestants. At the beginning of 2023, we started Operation Reconquista, a long-term plan for Bible-believing Christians to retake the mainline denominations. Our strategy was simple and depended on the simple rule that liberal congregations always die out while conservative ones don’t. So all we needed to do was strengthen the conservative minority of congregations in these broadly liberal denominations, knowing that they would eventually become a majority. Our plan had 5 steps.
1: Scouting
First, we did research and scout out mainline churches across the country to find out which ones are theologically conservative. We sent brave pioneers to investigate local mainline churches. Then, between the months of January and April, we created a custom online map of theologically moderate-to-conservative churches in each mainline denomination. By the end, we had hundreds of theologically sound churches that were PCUSA, Episcopal, United Methodist, and more on our map.
2: Community Forming
On the first day of June, which was the month when a lot of people would be shocked to see a pride flag on their church for the first time, we started the official Reconquista discord server, an online community platform. We used our social media influence to call all faithful mainline Protestants everywhere to join it. Within the first couple weeks, we gathered hundreds of people on our server, and by using our map, hundreds more found mainline churches to attend and then proceeded to join our group as well. Our discord community is split into subgroups for each denomination, so we were able to start a specific Reconquista group for Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, etc.
3. Connections and Alliances
Some of the people who joined our discord community were pastors, so they got us connected to the various conservative alliances that already exist in these mainline denominations. In September, the Rev. Jake Dell, an Episcopal priest who had written articles endorsing us, invited the leaders of our Episcopalian Reconquista community to a national gathering of conservative Episcopalian priests and bishops in Dallas, TX. There, we handed out the articles he had written, and got dozens of priests on board with our movement, including a few bishops. The Episcopal Reconquista founded their own independent organization called the Episcopal Fellowship for Renewal and got connected to Communion Partners, the conservative alliance of Episcopal priests. We Presbyterians have done something similar. We started Presbyterians for the Kingdom, and are getting connected to Theology Matters, an existing organization dedicated to getting orthodox PCUSA pastors through seminaries and into PCUSA church pulpits. The rest of the denominations in the Reconquista have all made their own denomination-specific organizations. These organizations continue to grow every day, and are working with faithful pastors in their mainline denominations to evangelize and produce theological content.
4. Out-Lasting
This is what will come next. Now that we are making alliances and thriving conservative sub-communities within these mainline denominations, all we need to do is wait for a little while for the liberal churches to keep dying out. This will be easier than ever, given that there is such a severe pastor shortage. Most mainline churches are in fact so desperate for leadership, that they will let any young person who joins have a major position. This means that, in addition to preserving conservative congregations, we can also push moderate mainline congregations in a more conservative direction. This will take up to a generation, but the math checks out. There are so many more Evangelicals who attend church regularly than Mainliners, and that gap continues to widen. The more Evangelicals we can get to start flooding the mainline churches, the sooner they will be retaken. Once the conservative minority becomes a majority, we can finally reverse all the liberal changes that have happened over the years and enforce adherence to the confessions and creeds.
5. Reunification
Our final goal is to reunify all the mainline denominations with their conservative offshoot counterparts. That means re-unifying the PCA and PCUSA, re-unifying the Episcopal Church and the ACNA, re-unifying the United Methodist Church with the Global Methodist Church, and so forth. Mainline denominations have a surplus of resources, but a shortage of members and pastors. Evangelical offshoots have a surplus of members and pastors, but a shortage of resources. So reunification seems like the obvious solution, but in order for that to be realistic, we need to correct the errors of the mainlines that caused these splits to happen in the first place.
Conclusion
You cannot revive a culture without reviving the churches it was founded upon. American culture was founded upon the churches that have now become the mainline Protestant churches. The only hope for American culture in the foreseeable future is if these extremely culturally significant churches see a true spiritual revival, and return to the gospel. Mathematically and practically, this is completely possible and is already beginning to go into effect. The question is, are we up to the challenge?
Image Credit: Unsplash
Lol, I somehow knew this was Redeemed Zoomer without even reading who wrote it. The focus on the “mainline vs. evangelical” split was a dead giveaway!
Very interesting and encouraging. Any Reformed Church in America (RCA) congregations in the Reconquista?
Yes! There are a lot of RCA members in the Reconquista. They wrote 95 Theses against liberalism to the RCA, and many pastors signed on to them.
Absolutely well written. It’ll be interesting to see how this develops theologically and socially over time. My theology and research may not always fit within the cultural goals that the reconquista envisions but my hope for the reformation of mainline churches and institutions stands strong all the same. We must return to a faithfulness to the creeds and a more robust theology of ethics.
Thanks for this Richard! This is a great essay. Keep up the good work.
It is one thing to want churches and denominations that are inundated with liberal theology to become more orthodox in their theologies, it is another to look at those churches as tools to gain control over culture. The latter would cause many to see theology as an object to be used to achieve goals outside of what the Scriptures tell us to achieve. In the case of the latter, theology becomes judged by how well it contributes to following a secular priority.
In addition, from what I see in the New Testament in terms of how we believers should relate to unbelievers, the concept of controlling others is not mentioned. We are told to leave those who do not accept what we preach and to not be like the Gentiles by lording it over others. So why are we to try to control unbelievers? Such past efforts have led to the Church hurting the reputation of the Gospel by being intolerant of unbelievers in society.
Finally, suppose that the mainline churches are reformed to an acceptable level, who says that they will affect culture. In America’s beginning and all of the way up through most of the 20th century, churches did greatly affect culture; but no longer. And so there is the distinct possibility that we could reform the mainline churches without culture being significantly change.
Richard, I’ve been aware of your online imprint since your interview with Aaron Renn. You’re doing amazing work. May I suggest you consider an interview with Professor Joshua Mitchell, author of American Awakening, sometime? I believe you, Professor Mitchell, and your followers would find a conversation between the two of you to be an enriching experience. (Not familiar with him? His talk at the 2023 Imago Dei Conference at Patrick Henry College is a great introduction to his insights). Keep up the great Kingdom work!
I like how practical are the steps you’re taking.
This reminds me of when I was visiting Yale in 1992. One graduate student attended the official university chapel even though it was pretty much like a mainline church. I think her reason was to preserve even a smidgeon of the True Church there. A good idea? Hard to say. But to have even a small remnant will keep a voice present in a denomination. Whether there needs to be more than that small remnant is unclear– and also, the remannt has to be vocal and irritating to the majority, or it isn’t doing any good.