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A back-to-basics mood is palpable among those training for the Protestant clergy, many of whom are older students who are entering second careers. President Neely McCarter of the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley says his graduates are still liberal in politics but "more conservative biblically and theologically. They want more worship, and they want more spirituality." At New York City's Union Theological Seminary, too, prayer groups have grown up, although, reports a participant, they are regarded as "kind of like a subculture." Many mainline youths prefer conservative training at such growing nondenominational schools as Fuller, Trinity Evangelical in Illinois and Gordon-Conwell in Massachusetts.
Should the mainline denominations move boldly left of their current wishy- washy liberalism or should they turn back to the evangelical old-time religion that they espoused until well into the 20th century? Analyst McKinney insists that if the mainliners move right, the exodus of disgruntled younger members would "blow the back door out." But that is not likely to occur anyway, at least if national staffs have anything to say about it. Theressa Hoover, a highly influential Methodist bureaucrat, contends that "you don't change focus just because constituencies give you trouble. We've taken as much of a beating in the past and never retreated."
Despite the successes of numerous local congregations, few experts foresee mainline Protestantism regaining its former clout and prosperity. Are the ballyhooed Evangelicals thus destined to constitute America's new religious center? One shrewd analyst in that conservative camp, Fuller's Mouw, has a surprising reply: "If there is an Establishment voice today, it is that of Roman Catholicism. The Catholics are the calm, dignified, authoritative voices, insofar as there are any at all." Lutheran Richard John Neuhaus even wrote a book claiming this to be The Catholic Moment for America.
But John Mulder, president of Louisville Presbyterian seminary, thinks it is unclear what kind of new moral core American society will develop or who will shape it. Most likely, America will never again have an unofficially established faith such as mainline Protestantism was for centuries. Perhaps, then, those genteel old churches are destined to fight a rear-guard battle to counteract a "society whose values are at odds with the gospel," in the mordant words of Spurgeon Dunnam of Texas, Methodism's most influential editor.
McKinney thinks the mainliners' present struggles could one day give them special strength. "America is being disestablished on the world scene," he explains. "How do we make sense out of being Americans in the 21st century?" In his scenario, churches that are currently being dethroned may help the American people come to terms with a similar humbling of the nation's status 50 and 100 years hence. Perhaps, then, mainline churches are being cast into a narrow sectarian role not unlike that of the European refugees who are known to history as the Pilgrims and Puritans. Unlike their 17th century predecessors, however, they have no New World to conquer.
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