(BA) Mainline Protestantism

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23 July 2022 - 24 July 2022

Mainline Protestantism, in a US context, refers to the denominations that existed prior to the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy that raged in the 1920's and 1930's. All of these major established denomination wound up on the 'modernist' side, that is, toward the acceptance of mainstream biblical scholarship. The great struggle produced a pyrrhic victory for mainstream Protestantism. While the 'modernists' gained control of the existing denominations, the fundamentalists largely left and formed their own breakaway institutions, which over the next decades grew while the mainstream churches faded away, to such a point that one might argue that intellectual heirs of fundamentalism are now in some sense the 'main line' in modern Protestantism, although not in scholarship.

More recently, there has been considerable 'left-ward' movement from the 'right' wing of Protestantism, and the conservative denominations have begun to decline, though still not as quickly as the continued collapse of the 'liberal' denominations.