I’ve spent a lot of time over the years writing about progressive Christianity and the churches that practice it. It’s easy to mock or shake our heads at the most extreme examples — as I like to do in my Progressive Christianity Watch columns — but those are obviously the outliers.
Many of these examples come from mainline Protestant churches. GotQuestions defines mainline denominations this way:
When people speak of “mainline denominations,” they are usually referring to the historic, established Protestant groups. In 2009, George Barna published a list of the churches that are commonly considered “mainline”: American Baptist Churches in the USA, the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the United Methodist Church. Other sources add the United Church of Christ, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Friends (Quakers), and some other churches to the list.
The mainline denominations are so-called because they are thought to represent the oldest, most influential branches of Protestantism in the States.
The mainline churches were dominant through the first half of the 20th century, but as these denominations and some of their congregations adopted more liberal theological and political positions, they began a steep decline. But just because the leaders of these churches are more liberal doesn’t mean that their members are, as new data that Ryan Burge has unearthed at Graphs About Religion.
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Hang on tight because I’m about to throw a bunch of numbers at you. Burge cites data from the Cooperative Election Study, and in those surveys, an average of 12.6% of voters identified as mainline Protestants.
Burge notes:
In 2008, the mainline was evenly divided between Barack Obama and John McCain. It was truly a 50/50 election. But that was the last time that was true. When Mitt Romney ran in 2012, he earned 54% of the mainline vote. When Donald Trump ran in 2016, he earned 54% of the mainline vote. When he ran again in 2020 he got exactly the same share — 54%. The only thing interesting to note is that the mainline weren’t huge fans of Hillary Clinton, she only received 41% of ballots cast. That was (at that moment) a low point.
Burge broke those numbers down by denomination and found some interesting stats. Roughly half of the voters in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America voted Republican in all of the elections between 2008 and 2024, and Donald Trump captured 53% of that denomination’s vote last year. United Methodists are also traditionally GOP voters, and Trump captured an impressive 62% of the Methodist vote.
Voters in the Presbyterian Church USA go back and forth between Democrats and Republicans, but 57% of that denomination’s voters broke for Trump in November. Members of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) are all over the map in voting for presidential candidates, but Trump garnered 51% of the vote in that (quasi-)denomination in 2024. Even the ultra-progressive United Church of Christ — Barack Obama’s denomination of choice — gave Trump a slight majority of 51% last year.
Two of the seven major mainline denominations gave Kamala Harris a majority of their votes in 2024. Episcopalians have been overwhelmingly Democratic voters since 2008, and they voted 55% for Harris and only 40% for Trump. Fifty-two percent of American Baptists went for Harris, but Trump’s 48% showing demonstrates a steady increase in GOP voters in that denomination.
Again, that’s a lot of numbers (sorry), but Trump saw the Republicans’ best showing since 2008 in six of those seven denominations in November. Thus, it makes sense to conclude that members of these denominations are more conservative than their leaders. Will those leaders take note? I think we know the answer to that question.
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