The Protestant Churchs’ Rejection of Ecclesiastical Authority and its Secular Convergence

Protestant churches have gradually turned away from doctrinal, ecclesiastical, and liturgical structures and have turned towards secularization.

Readership: Christian Men
Theme: The Protestant Reformation 2.0
Length: 2,000 words
Reading Time: 10 minutes

Intro

As part of my mini-series on The Protestant Reformation 2.0, my last post provided a relatively concise (and yet still very long) summary of the shifts in Protestant church attendance and religious identities over the past 50 years, both Evangelical and Mainline, and how many Protestants have converted to Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Nones, by age, sex, and generation, and vice versa.

Jack’s Thesis

After studying the data, demographics, denominational shifts, switching, and other information, I believe two major trends have occurred and have become visible within Protestantism since the Sexual Revolution, although it started much earlier.

1. A rejection of ecclesiastical authority.
2. A convergence with secular values (e.g., Feminism, Humanism, Transhumanism, W0kism, etc.)

This realignment (or perhaps more meaningfully described as a “turning away”) has happened in most Protestant sects, but in different ways.

To explain this falling away, I’ll offer a brief history for each of the major Christian sects, cite the relevant data, and make my case below.

Catholicism

The number of people identifying as Catholic has steadily grown since WW2, and yet, the Catholic church is still losing members, and it has one of the worst accession rates of all religions (8%).

This apparent contractiction appears very strange and counterintuitive, until … you consider the role of authority and immigration.

• Roughly 80% of Hispanic Catholics and 92% of Asian Catholics in the U.S. are either immigrants or the children of immigrants.
• Approximately 29-30% of all adult Catholics in the United States are first-generation immigrants
• Another 14% are the children of immigrants.
• In total, 40% of the total American Catholic population is of direct immigrant stock.
• While domestic adult conversions fluctuate and have seen localized periodic upswings, immigration remains the primary structural pipeline that offsets departures and reshapes the cultural identity of the Catholic church in America.
• Sources: [Aleteia 2026, Catholic Culture, Catholic Herald, FSSPX, National Humanities Center, Pew 2025]

In short, indentured U.S. citizens are turning away en masse from the authoritative structure of the Catholic church, even while their attrition is shored up by many Catholic immigrants — but not nearly enough to prevent the ship from slowly sinking.

Mainline Protestants

Mainline Protestants (e.g., ELCA, Episcopal, PCUSA, UCC, United Methodist, et al.) have had a dramatic long-term decline, more than any other major Christian group.  These churches have suffered membership losses of 40–70% since peaks in the 1960s. Attendance and institutional vitality have plummeted, with thousands of churches closing.

In sum:

• Mid-1970s: Mainline Protestants comprised ~30%+ of U.S. adults.
• In Pew’s 2007 Religious Landscape Study (RLS), they comprised ~18.1% of U.S. adults.
• 2010s: ~11–16%
• In the 2023-24 RLS, the numbers fell to ~11%.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Mainline churches chose to remain more conservative / fundamental / traditional.  However, in recent years, many Mainline churches have totally and catastrophically abandoned their conservative / fundamental / traditional values, and have entirely rolled over to the feminist / pagan cultural dictums, even ordaining Females and H0m0sexuals into the clergy.

In summary of the Mainliners track record to date: they resisted both cultural and religious trends in the 1970s and 1980s, betrayed the tenets of the faith in the 1990s and 2000s, and then rolled over to W0ke indoctrination in the 2010s and 2020s.

Overall, it seems that, for each and every decade, Mainliners were intent on doing whatever was most expedient to their own disqualification and elimination, and were consistent about sticking their heads in the sand and calling this self-effacing stupidity a rejection of anti-Christian values — values which were, in fact, more closely aligned to cultural dictums than scripture, and which had to be redefined every decade, apparently in order to speed their demise.

It is one thing to resist and reject the urge to follow the societal trends in order to be popular.

It is quite another to buck everything going on in both Christendom and secular culture and double down on nothing more than being a stupendous maverick or a showroom of faux liberal values, and then rationalizing that just because the chosen way is narrow, rejected, and unpopular, then it must necessarily be The Way.

Need I repeat the axiom: “Go Woke, Go Broke!”  There is nary a more pertinent example of this axiom than what has occurred within Mainline Protestantism over the past 50 years.

American Evangelical Protestants

Evangelical Protestant churches grew significantly during the 1970s–1990s, from ~22% to ~30+% of the U.S. population.  For a time in the mid to late 1970s, when American football was the uncontested ruler of all three TV stations, followed by totally truthful news broadcasts (imagine that!), it was actually cool to distinguish one’s self as a Thoreauish-Waldensian, Bible-thumping, Born Again™ bohemian hippie / hyper-relaxed peacenik.  This social movement actually gave birth to the soccer-mom phenomenon and provided fertile soil for the growth of AEP Churchian Egalitarianism, which came later in the 1980s.  (This might seem incredulously far removed from the present day, but I was a child during that time and I remember it well, so I trust readers can take my word on it.)

However,

• Much of the gains / sustenance in Evangelicalism (including Non-Denoms) during this time came at the cost of Mainline losses.
• Since the 2000s, Evangelicalism has seen steady declines.
• In Pew’s 2007 Religious Landscape Studies (RLS), Evangelicals were ~26%.
• Pew’s RLS in 2023-24 placed Evangelicals at ~23%, almost what it was before the Evangelical Revival that occurred in the late 1970s.  Nevertheless, AEP continues to be the largest religious bloc in the U.S.

Looking back, with all that we know now (via Dalrock et al.), it’s not hard to see that the explosive growth of AEP during the late 1970s and 1980s was accomplished by appealing to and compromising with the Feminist values and hedonistic sexual libertinism common in the wider American culture, as manifested in Complementarianism, The Born Again Slore Life Script / The Career Life Script / The College Boyfriend™ / The Feminist Life Script, postporning marriage, shaming S1ut Shaming, and the already large and growing ubiquity of divorce as a norm, even within the church.  (All these topics have been discussed ad infinitum in the Christian Manosphere long before C0V!D.  Please click on the links for more info.)

Non-Denominational Protestants

Although the rise in “Nones” has been phenomenal, not all AEP decline as of late has been a turn away from Christianity altogether.  During the 2000s, many Evangelicals shifted away from denominationally affiliated Churches (i.e. Baptist, Nazarene, Presbyterian, et al.), to AEP Flavored Non-Denominational congregations, which have seen much growth since then.

Interestingly, although many Non-Denoms are not overtly classified or advertised as Evangelical, if you’ve ever visited a few of them, you’ll know that they are hardly any different, mostly because a plurality of their adherents, or their parents, defected from AEP churches.  There are very few differences in doctrine; and if any, they are minor.  The main difference is affiliational — they don’t pay homage to, or try to align themselves with, the larger central leadership — or the doctrinal precepts — of ANY denomination.

IOW, they have rejected the ecclesiastical authority of ANY denomination.

I believe this is not coincidental, but is part of the larger attrition away from organized Christian churches.

The Rejection of Ecclesiastical Authority

All of these shifts and realignments can be simply explained as follows.

U.S. Catholics are running with their tails between their legs to get out from under the more authoritative, and ironically, ever less doctrinally aligned, Vatican led structures.  Meanwhile, Catholic immigrants remain the more faithful (or the more blindly ignorant).

Mainliners have done the same, but quietly and without the pompous pontification.

Many of these exiters migrated to AEP (according to the stats, if not the individuals themselves).  As a result, AEP enjoyed the limelight of faux religiosity for a couple of decades in the late 20^th century, largely due to their doctrinal accommodation of secular Feminism in the form of Complementarianism.  But although Evangelical churches have been rather resilient, especially compared with Mainline churches, they have still lost ground overall — as has “Christianity” in general.

The shifting preference for Non-Denoms during the 1990s and 2000s has driven much of the resilience within Evangelicalism. But overall, the expansion of Non-Denominational churches has been driven by a mass-scale, grass-roots rejection of AEP’s already too liberal, yet stubbornly structured ecclesiastical authority (fueled in part by the Boomers’ generation-wide rejection of authoritative structures in general). 

Looking at the overall trend, the movement throughout the decades has been AWAY from ecclesiastical structure and order, and towards Antinomianism or else Ressentimentalism.

Secular Convergence

All of the above rejection of ecclesiastical authority was juxtaposed with the massive embrace of liberal, sexually permissive values of the surrounding culture, and this happened church-wide — both in the church leadership, deceived by secular Feminism, and on the level of the individual, Blue Pilled, Chivalrous, Churchian layman, hoping to keep his debased marriage intact and his hard-earned finances solvent.

Since the late 1980s, the church retained doctrines that were more or less solid (due to the clear stance of the Danver’s Statement), but the exegesis and practice of those doctrines continued to be compromised with secular culture (as in Evangelical churches), or else, leaned ever more liberal and acculturated (as in the Mainline churches).

Moreover, almost every sect of the church has tacitly embraced or tentatively tolerated Feminist / Liberal / sexually permissive values of the surrounding culture, and as a result, the church has grown ever more feminized since the 1960s.  This was, of course, hardly ever overtly stated, much less formally indoctrinated, but nevertheless, was fundamentally still occurring in the background and was tacitly accepted.

Conclusions

Considering all of the data above and in past posts, the trend since the 1960s is that highly structured churches have become less popular, and large numbers of people have migrated to ever less structured churches over time.

In general, we see there has been a “stream” of (weak) adherents shifting out of Catholicism, and away from Mainline denominations, to Evangelical churches. This was followed by another “stream” of Evangelicals defecting to Non-Denominational affiliations.

Obviously, it becomes much more complicated as we get down to the individual level, and motivations vary by age/generation, as Burge observed.  Americans, in general, are very uncomfortable with structures of authority, yea, anything that strays from the democratic, egalitarian, “Enlightened” grid.

However, I see there are generally three tracks of mobility within the Christian world:

• The Liberal Track: People are drawn to less ecclesiastical authority, less doctrinal and liturgical structure, and more ecumenism.
• The Conservative Track: Most realignments within Christian denominations often fall along the lines of people either being drawn to liturgy or tradition and/or being repelled by Feminist / Woke compromises in church leadership.
• The Apostate Track: Most “Nones” appear to come from disillusionment or confusion surrounding hypocrisies and schisms within the church.

Overall, we see a 50+ year symbiotic trend of people being drawn to less structured churches, and churches becoming less structured and more compromising with the culture in response to people’s changing tastes.

This migration stands in contrast with men’s general nature of preferring structure and order.

That said, readers might intuitively understand why many men are changing churches, or leaving church altogether, while there is a revived interest in church among a smaller number of more seriously conservative men.

I’ll expand on this observation in the next few posts, which will address men drifting away from the church and men returning to it, respectively.

Exit Question

The question remains: Is this mass exodus from culturally converged ecclesiastical authority a good thing, or does it constitute a falling away from the ancient faith in Christ?

Related

• Σ Frame: Tweaking Complementarianism for Mass Consumption (2023/7/26)
• Σ Frame: What is the Spiritual Power of Authority? (2024/1/11)
• Σ Frame: Faith and Authority (2025/8/29)
• Σ Frame: Addressing Criticisms of Faith and Authority (2025/8/30)
• Σ Frame: The Age Old Question of Authority (2025/9/3)
• Σ Frame: The Prophecies of Michael Spencer (2026/3/18)
• Σ Frame: The Para-Prophecies of Dalrock (2026/3/20)
• Σ Frame: American Protestant Churches — Why do they Decline? (2026/3/25)
• Σ Frame: A Summary of the Negative Effects of Complementarianism and Egalitarianism within American Evangelical Protestant Churches (2026/3/27)