The Empty Church: The Suicide of Liberal Christianity

In this alarming expose of America's mainline Protestant churches, historian Thomas C. Reeves asserts that these once hallowed houses of worship do not matter nearly so much as they used to, and that, in fact, they are consistently unappealing and irrelevant. Mainline churches are spiritual home to almost a quarter of the American people. They include the American Baptist churches, the Disciples of Christ, Episcopal, Evangelical Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches, and the United Church of Christ. Still, millions of parishioners have abandoned them in disgust. And the question is, why?
Reeves attributes this crisis, in part, to the growth of a liberal church leadership whose political interests have distorted faith and orthodoxy and replaced them with political correctness. In the hands of liberal organizers, mainline churches have become bastions of "progressive" politics, wherein Christian teaching has lost out to multiculturalism, and theology itself has tended to become secular, focusing more on liberal issues such as AIDS awareness and feminist critiques of God the Father than on the life and teachings of Christ. As a result, many churches have alienated their orthodox members and lost their strongest adherents. What, asks Reeves, can be done to reverse this disturbing trend?
Based on his own probing investigations, Reeves makes informed recommendations for revitalizing them, and argues that the most critical step in halting the slide of mainline churches is the restoration of their commitment to orthodox theology. Taking his cue from C. S. Lewis, Reeves argues that orthodoxy requires faith in an all-powerful God who was and is capable of the miraculous. Christianity without miracles is dead, and its founder and the apostles madmen.

Thomas C. Reeves is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, and a Senior Fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute.