Are Conservative Churches Growing?

Responding to an old but new claim

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

(A ten-minute read.)

A few months ago, someone forwarded a video on to me that featured a well-known pastor making the claim that conservative Protestant denominations in the United States were growing while liberal ones were dying.

This is not necessarily a novel claim, as such an idea has been prevalent among conservative Christians for decades.

But the pastor pointed this out in an attempt to encourage his audience to remain faithful to that “old time religion” of yesteryear and to not compromise by utilizing innovative and “worldly” methods—like using contemporary music for worship—or heretical theologies—like non-traditional views of sexuality—in order to try to draw people in.

Those methods and that theology don’t work anyway, he insisted, so we may as well stick to the old tried and true methods that have withstood the test of time.

The brief video was very intriguing to me—and I felt compelled to articulate a brief response, since the video seemed to be making the rounds.

To be clear: this is not a criticism of the person himself, as I have a great deal of respect for him and thought he made a lot of good points.

But what he shared is a rather common perspective—one that I’ve probably offered myself in the past—and so it deserves some careful and thoughtful consideration.

To that end, I thought I’d offer three brief reflections:

1. Statistically speaking, it is not at all evident that conservative Protestants denominations in America are growing, while liberal ones are dying. There may have been a time when it was true, but those days are over.

The truth is, all Protestant denominations and non-denominations are dying in America—and rather precipitously. The rise of “nones”—that is, those who check the “none” box when answering what religion they affiliate with—is rising at breakneck speed, with an 80% increase in those identifying as such since 2007 (from 16% of the population to 29%).

Simply put, no Christian faith tradition is growing in America—liberal, conservative, moderate, or otherwise—so no one has much room to boast.

But even here there’s another interesting phenomenon that has recently developed, bucking conventional wisdom: for decades, there were more “evangelical” (ie., conservative) Protestants in America than “mainline” (ie., liberal) Protestants. But that has recently shifted.

While both expressions of Protestantism are dying, conservative denominations in America, for the first time since the 1970s, are now shrinking at a faster rate than liberal denominations, with conservative denominations now making up just 14% of the US population, and liberal denominations making up 16%.

So, statistically speaking, both “conservative” and “liberal” denominations are dying; but conservative denominations are dying quicker.

Perhaps there’s no more acute illustration of this than the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), which has been the largest Protestant denomination in America for decades and is the epitome of conservatism. But the SBC is hemorrhaging at an alarming rate: from 2018-2021, the SBC lost over a million members in just a three-year span, marking its lowest membership in 40 years.

The bottom line: all Protestant denominations in America (and Roman Catholics too) are dying, but conservative denominations are actually dying faster.

2. What does it mean to be “conservative” or “liberal” anyway? In the video, the pastor used the terms “conservative” and “liberal” but didn’t really define them.

From what I gather, according to what he said, a liberal church is one that uses contemporary worship music, serves coffee and donuts in the lobby before church, and holds non-traditional views on sexuality and science.

But in my experience, there are very few churches, for example, that both utilize contemporary worship music and also promote non-traditional views of sexuality. These are not the same types of congregations.

What I mean by that is that the churches that often have the “glitziest” worship programs, or who have coffee shops in their lobbies, are actually very conservative theologically and morally—and probably even more so than the aforementioned pastor himself would be (for example: you could probably find a huge congregation that is a part of the Southern Baptist Convention, which utilizes contemporary forms of worship music, but who wouldn’t dare allow a woman to preach [at least with men present], which I’m quite sure the aforementioned pastor would be fine with).

Thus, there’s a huge difference between being conservative or liberal methodologically (ie., the particular evangelistic methods one uses), and being conservative or liberal theologically (ie., the views a church has when it comes to questions about the authority of the Bible, or on sexuality and gender and science, etc.).

It may just be a minor point, but I do think it’s helpful to make sure we’re clear on what we mean by “conservative” or “liberal,” so we’re not just indiscriminately throwing those labels out, which makes it harder for us to effectively evaluate the approaches and beliefs of various faith communities—and how we relate to them.

I get the impression, though, that some people use the term “liberal” to describe whatever it is that other people do that they disagree or feel uncomfortable with.

I’m not sure how helpful that is, however.

3. And what does it mean to be “worldly”? I think, more than anything, what challenges me the most is the implicit assumption that those other people are utilizing “worldly” methods while we’re not.

Serving donuts, using drums and fog machines and dressing down, is caving in to the “world” and allowing the culture to influence us—while using old, traditional methods is not.

But it seems to me that this is misguided.

From what I’ve observed, and as I’ve written about before, there’s no culture-less expression of faith. We are all working from within some cultural, “worldly” context.

Wearing suits, sitting in pews, and singing with organ accompaniment is no less “worldly” than any other expression. All these things were first utilized at a specific point in history and in a specific context (and often with considerable controversy), and did not fall down to us from heaven.

Everything humans make—whether it’s music, instruments, clothing—is, by definition, “worldly,” since every human being inhabits the world.

This also applies to the way we organize our corporate worship, or even the way we explain or frame the gospel.

All of us are living out or expressing our religious values within a particular cultural context, and none of us have risen above these things. And that is perfectly OK, since the heart of the Christian message says that God met us in a particular social and cultural location—when he came in the Person of Jesus—and ever meets us where we are, since we are all limited by our finitude and worldliness (John Calvin says that the Bible itself is God, coming down to our level, contextualizing himself to the “rude and gross intellect of man”).

Missiologist Lesslie Newbigin put it this way (which any good missionary recognizes):

Every interpretation of the gospel is embodied in some cultural form. The missionary does not come with the pure gospel and then adapt it to the culture where she serves: she comes with a gospel which is already embodied in the culture by which the missionary was formed.

This is such a huge idea.

It’s not that those people at those “liberal” churches are the only ones selling out to culture and adopting the gospel to a particular “worldly” context. Everyone—even the people who insist that we can only sing hymns, wear suits, and sit in pews—is utilizing methods and styles that derive from a particular “worldly” culture.

Indeed, every articulation of the gospel, every approach to evangelism or “church”—even “conservative” ones—utilizes a particular culture to express the gospel and to appeal to some demographic.

And that is perfectly OK—and, in fact, really good and important (and failing to recognize this seriously hinders our witness).

There are many reasons why I think this idea is so important, but I will just briefly mention three in particular:

Firstly, failing to recognize this seriously opens us up to idolatry, ethnocentrism, imperialism, and racism. We basically end up sacralizing our particular culture, conflating it with the gospel itself, thus potentially leading us to worship the created rather than the Creator.

Secondly, doing so leaves us unable to properly evaluate the ways in which we ourselves may be idolizing our culture, and unable to truly evaluate the effectiveness of our methods.

If we assume our cultural expressions and methods are universally and eternally normative, then, from a pragmatic perspective, we will never allow ourselves to assess whether they’re truly effective or not (because to question the effectiveness of the methods is to question God himself).

We just keep doing them because we think those methods have timeless, universal applicability, conflating the eternal message with the temporal delivery method.

One quick example: many people in my faith community take the evangelistic counsel of certain nineteenth-century voices as having timeless authority—applicable in all times and in places.

So if someone said in 1905 that a certain book should be sent out to everyone, they assume this counsel itself is timeless and should be followed in 2023 (regardless of whether life is different in 2023 than in 1905).

Thus, whole cities, whose residents are mostly non-religious, get blanketed with that book (to the great frustration and anger of many).

There’s no recognition that the counsel, given in 1905, was given in a specific cultural context—and therefore may not be as effective in other cultural contexts.

So the methods are left unevaluated because we believe, since they were commanded by God himself, we must always use the method of one culture for every other culture (believing, when it comes right down to it, that these methods simply derive from heaven’s culture).

And to therefore question that culture’s methods is to question God himself.

But this is what happens when we believe our culture is God’s culture, even if we turn off a lot of people in the process (and spend a lot of money to do so).

Thus, absent a willingness to take a step back and honestly wrestle with how effective our approaches are, there are thousands of churches that remain on “life support” because they refuse to abandon the “old ways,” believing those old ways were ordained by God for all eternity, come what may.

Which leads me to my last concern: perhaps most troublingly, when we don’t recognize our own cultural assumptions and approaches—effectively conflating our culture with this supposed universal, heavenly, timeless culture—we very easily vilify and demonize other cultural expressions that don’t toe the line. Ours is the pure and holy approach, we implicitly believe, while other people are using unholy and “worldly” methods.

And a church’s religious fidelity is supposedly determined by the degree to which they dogmatically stick to what Christians did 150 years ago.

And this creates all sorts of religious conflict, judgment, and tension—that, in my opinion, is quite unfortunate and unhealthy.

The bottom line

In summary, from all the best data, it’s simply not true that conservative denominations are growing while liberal ones are dying. Christianity as a whole is shrinking in America (and other Western nations), though conservative communities are, for the first time in decades, dying at a faster rate than liberal ones.

Thus, I don’t think this claim can be used as a sort of “rallying cry” to simply stick to the “old ways.”

This doesn’t mean we should just throw all caution to the wind and sell out to the trendy and relevant (as I’ve recently stated).

But we do need to recognize that we all utilize particular cultures and methods in our worship of God and in our attempts to share the gospel with others, and none of us have exclusive access to some sort of “other-worldly” cultural approach (because, quite simply, since God fully affirms this world, and loves diversity, it seems to me that he’s quite happy with us worshipping him and sharing his love with others in our own unique, God-honoring ways).

So let’s celebrate diversity. Let’s pursue the good but hard work of developing ways to share the gospel that aren’t implicitly laced with imperialism—which needlessly distracts people from the gospel—and affirm the goodness of every culture (even while recognizing that every culture—even our own—has practices, values, and methods that don’t align with the Jesus-way).

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Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) student at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.