Explaining church decline in America is a cottage industry, almost as big as the cottage industry of quick-fix solutions to congregational malaise and decline.
It is easy to blame the culture wars, the boomers, the seeker-sensitive movement, the internet, the Republican Party, and (occasionally) myself. The explanations are different. The shape underneath them was identical. Every single one was a story about faithfulness. Ours, or somebody else’s, but always faithfulness. Somebody got something wrong, and this is the bill coming due.
Then Andrew Root’s new book, Baal and the Gods of More: Rescuing Church Growth from Idolatry, put a chart in front of me, and I have been irritated ever since seeing it.
Here is the line that did it. Andy points out that The Jetsons seemed like a documentary to people in the sixties. Flying cars, robot maids, a colony in the sky, and none of it read as fantasy — it read as forecasting. Because when you are running around three percent real GDP growth, the standard of living doesn’t just double in a generation. It doubles twice. Your grandparents had an outhouse, and you have a dishwasher, and the arithmetic says your kids get the flying car.
Those people were not naive. They were reading a chart and treating their moment as the norm.
The special century
The chart belongs to Robert Gordon, an economist Andy describes as curmudgeonly, which is the kindest possible word for a man who wrote eight hundred pages to tell America the party is over. Gordon’s argument is that 1870 to 1970 was a special century — an unrepeatable hundred years when two industrial revolutions landed on top of each other. The first arrived about a decade after the Civil War. The second was electricity, and it detonated between the two world wars. The numbers are absurd. You got more growth in two years of the 1960s than in five centuries of the medieval period.
We have been waiting for the third revolution ever since. It came. It came out of Silicon Valley, and it gave us everything except the thing we were waiting for. Streaming Netflix does not make anybody more productive. The one decent run we got, roughly 1995 to 2005, popped, and we named it after the bubble it was.
Gordon, for the record, is not some anti-capitalist scold. He wants the growth. He is an American. His whole complaint is that we need it desperately and we have gotten bad at it.
We were surfing
Now put the church on top of that chart.
The century American Protestantism remembers as its golden age sits precisely inside Gordon’s special century. And we did not have an established church, because we are Americans and we do not do that. We just had a country where the pastor was a civic figure, the denominations built the institutions, and going to seminary in 1958 carried roughly the cache of going to med school. That is not establishment on paper. That is establishment. Something seminary students today can hardly imagine.
Here is the part that should keep you up. The hand-wringing about mainline decline begins the same decade the growth stops. Not a decade later. Not after some theological betrayal we can name and litigate. Right then.
I watched the sequel from inside it. I was a Southern Baptist when the fundamentalists we used roll our educated eyes at took the whole thing over, and for years I understood that as a fight about the Bible, because that is what everyone said it was about. Andy’s read is structural, and it is worse. Evangelicals inherited the mantle partly because they were built for the world after the special century. They had already located growth in the individual rather than the system. If the tide is not going to lift you anymore, you want a theology where you swim.
The consolation, and then the sting
So here is the good news, and I mean it: your church is probably not shrinking because you failed.
You were not the wave. You were surfing.
That is genuine consolation, and most pastors have never once been offered it. Now the sting. If the golden age was substantially a tailwind, the tailwind is not coming back, and everything we built for it was calibrated to conditions that no longer exist. The staffing model. The building. The budget. The reflex that says a healthy church is one with more.
Andy has a line about seminaries that I cannot shake, about how you pick up right away that the place used to have a glorious past, when chapel was full, and the cafeteria was running — and you find yourself wondering what it would take to get back there. I have been in that room, and many of you have too. And his diagnosis of what is happening there is the sentence I keep repeating to people who did not ask: this is nostalgia, and nostalgia is longing for something good we never actually had.
Same error, bigger flag
Which brings us to the birthday.
Because America is running the identical play, just louder. The version of the country we are being told to get back to is the postwar one, and we tell that story as though it fell out of our national character. It did not. We had oceans between us and everybody else’s war. We got to monetize the rebuilding of everything that got blown up. We wrote the rules of the order because we were the only ones still standing to write them. That was a set of circumstances. We have been reading it as a verdict on our virtue.
The church did the exact same thing at a smaller scale, and called it spiritual faithfulness.
And this is where Andy says the thing I did not expect from a practical theologian at a birthday party. The founders were not stabilizing this country on growth. They thought they were stabilizing it on freedom — with, as he is careful to say, deep hypocrisies baked in about who exactly got to be free. Growth got swapped in later. By the mid-seventies we were so panicked about losing it that we handed Carter the bill, elected Reagan and Thatcher on the promise of getting it back, and restructured the entire economy around the pledge. It worked. For a few.
Andy does not stop at diagnosis, and I am not going to spend his ending for him. But he takes this to Kings, to the kings on the downside of a golden era who decided the God who got them out of Egypt could be blended with a god who guarantees yield. His claim is that the God of Israel wants children he rescues and gives rest to, not cogs for more and more.
Sit with the word cogs for a second before you decide that is only about ancient Israel.
So the questions I am carrying into this anniversary are two, and they rhyme. At 250, are we throwing a party for a country or holding a wake for a chart? And for those of us who love the church: is there any way to be stable that is not growing?
I do not have it. Andy has some of it. So do the eleven other scholars in this summit, none of whom were assigned a theme — we asked each of them to bring whatever they are carrying into this moment, and what came back is a chorus rather than an argument.
Come find out what you have been surfing.
Andy's full lecture is right up top and he takes the argument places this essay doesn't, including the part where he maps a century of Protestant establishment onto the same chart and then goes after Ahab. Watch it with your staff, your board, your adult ed class, whoever you'd normally have this conversation with over bad coffee.
It's one of twelve lectures in our America at 250 Summit. We didn't assign anybody a theme; we asked each scholar to bring whatever they're carrying into this moment, and what came back is a chorus rather than a single argument — Juan Floyd-Thomas on Black prophetic witness, Elesha Coffman on Margaret Mead watching Christian nationalism rehearse in 1941, and many more. Every talk comes with a discussion guide; Diana and I are hosting live conversations with several of the contributors, and the whole thing is built so a congregation can actually use it. Register at www.TheologySummit.com
Join Our Summer 2026 Online Summit with Diana Butler Bass & Tripp Fuller!
This summer, Diana Butler Bass and Tripp Fuller are hosting Faith at 250 — an online summit gathering leading religion scholars, church historians, and theologians to reflect on America’s 250th anniversary. With the current administration leveraging the semiquincentennial toward a narrow rendering of the church’s history and witness in America, and a flood of Christian nationalist celebrations on the horizon, we wanted to create something different. Each contributor — including Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Elesha Coffman, Corey Walker, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Andrew Root, Adam Clark, Glenn Jonas, Kevin Carnahan, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — offers a lecture on whatever they are carrying into this moment, whether that’s a deep read on a chapter of our religious past, a close look at a particular tradition or movement, or a forward-looking meditation on the challenges ahead. No one was asked to fit a theme. The result is a chorus, not a single argument.
Every talk is roughly 30 minutes — designed so a group can watch together and still have time for real conversation — and each comes with a companion discussion guide and resource list pointing you to the scholar’s books, articles, and projects. Whether you’re a pastor planning programming for your congregation, a facilitator leading a book club or adult ed class, or an individual learner who wants to think more carefully about faith and the American story, this summit was built for you. Diana and Tripp will also host live conversations with several contributors throughout the summit. Head to www.TheologySummit.com to register and get access to every lecture, livestream replay, and discussion guide.
New Class Just Announced - The Christ Empired Couldn’t Keep
Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it’s some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn’t — it’s a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn’t Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You’ll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together.
It’s free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com.
Join Us at Theology Beer Camp 2026 - Will You Be There?
THEOLOGY BEER CAMP
October 8-10, 2026 - Kansas City, MO
Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craft beer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. Organized by Homebrewed Christianity, this event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities.
NOW ANNOUNCING: The Theology Beer Camp Pre-Event
We’re excited to share details about our Pre-Event experience. Think of it like a theological pre-game.
Led by Thomas Jay Oord and Jonathan Foster, we’re bringing you a fantastic lineup of scholars, authors, pastors, and practitioners. This workshop-style gathering is a focused deep dive into Open and Relational Theology before the main event begins.
Think of it as:
A relational head start on Beer Camp
A chance to explore ideas in greater depth
An opportunity to meet people and start building connections before the larger gathering begins
Topics include:
God and an evolving universe
Open and relational approaches to ministry
Theology centered on love and relationship
Process thought and contemporary spirituality
Faith, creativity, freedom, and the future
The Pre-Event takes place on October 8 from 9am–4pm and is available as an add-on registration.
