Politics, religion, and pastors.
In his essay, “How Big is the Political Divide Between Mainline Clergy and Laity?,” Ryan Burge, Professor of Practice at Washington University analyzes the data about clergy and the laity in mainline Christianity and comes to an obvious conclusion: there is a significant gap in the political beliefs of clergy and laity in mainline Christianity.
In short, mainline clergy as a whole are significantly more likely to be liberal than are the members of the congregation.
Simple observation and anecdotal evidence seems to confirm this — or at least it feels true.
But is it real? I have questions. Not about the methodology, which is sound. Or about the statistics themselves. I’m more concerned with the nature of the observation. I’m convinced we’ll draw the wrong conclusions. Because Burge does.
I’ve Been Dwelling on This For a Month.
It feels both true and false at the same time. And yet, I couldn’t quite articulate what it was that made me feel that way. Yes, of course, it hits close to home. It is, as they say, something in which I might find myself in the data. But this, too, seems too simple and easy. Too much, in fact, like the problem itself: that it can feel strangely right in one sense and deeply, naggingly off in another.
Burge went on the Homebrewed Christianity podcast with Tripp Fuller right before Christmas to talk about “The Great Disconnect: When the Pulpit and the Pew aren’t Speaking the Same Language”. The conversation was wide-ranging and, at times, quite deep. Fuller is an excellent interviewer for depth and longer dialogue. The episode didn’t alleviate or even answer my questions, but it did bring a lot more clarity to them.
1. Mainline Out of Context
Burge phrases the situation as a mismatch within the mainline. Then he asks: shouldn’t the leadership match the people? So, of course, who wouldn’t say yes?
Except . . . what is the bigger picture?
We know that much of the evangelical church is disproportionately conservative: well beyond the average. When we place the mainline in relation to, say, the Assemblies of God (which is one of the groups Burge names at one point — a very conservative denomination that is in the charismatic tradition), there are a large number of people who are conservative and would rather be in the mainline.
Much of the argument Burge is making about mainline mismatch is relative within the wider tradition, but he excludes the wider tradition from his analysis. His assumption, that it should match underlines how he wants to isolate the analysis from context. This can be valuable. And it is definitely why the question resonates. But there is much more here that makes the context also important. Because . . .
2. Political Coherence
I spent every moment reading and listening wondering “what if this is only political?” The sorting, the observing. And that Burge’s research starts, not from church, but from politics. What if this is all politics and not church? Burge’s argument relies on a vision of politics that is coherent and immutable. In other words, as if we are politically consistent, measurable, and unchanging creatures.
We talk about conservative principles as a static ideology. And yet, we then discuss politics like a left/right sort between ideologies — if we’re not one, we’re the other — which is antithetical to the idea of a static ideology. It becomes about teams and one’s relationship to those teams far more than what it is we actually believe.
So, when Burge takes the Mainline churches out of the wider context, he’s also analyzing a political analysis that is driven by relative relationship. AND a relative relationship that keeps shifting because . . .
3. Historical Context
MAGA is a different kind of conservatism than the Moral Majority of the 1980s. Christian Nationalism is a different kind of conservatism than the anti-empire approach of 20th century evangelicalism. And all of it makes the old Rockefeller Republican look pretty liberal. Heck, it made plenty of people think that Liz Cheney represented “the other side” from it.
Stripping the mainline of the wider Christian context, Burge’s approach seems to remove us from the historical context. Context that helps us understand the development of both our political and religious traditions.
Restoring this context would particularly help us frame notions of religious liberty and political speech. And what we will see is how much conservative politics gets coded into “religious freedom.”
Burge doesn’t interrogate conservatism in the piece at all. Or seem to be interested in what draws conservatives to the mainline, let alone what changing visions of conservatism are doing to conservative churches. Nor does he delve into the political actions of conservative groups to shape the religious landscapes to broadly reform mainline churches in the 20th century.
If we don’t do that for conservatism, we need to be clear we also aren’t doing that for liberalism.
4. Self-Reporting
The trouble with self-reporting isn’t just about accuracy. It is that our identities, culture, and political lives are wrapped up in a variety of ways — and it isn’t consistent! Again, we are assuming a kind of political coherence that is representative of something. A coherence that is politically and chronologically unstable.
Much of what defines life in the Mainline church codes as conservative (tradition) and liberal (mission). And when kept in the bigger context, we are confronted with the mainline being relatively liberal in relationship to how conservative the conservative church is. And also, in relationship to American faith traditions, the mainline is moderate and as representational as the general population. This means the mainline is both liberal and moderate, depending on one’s perspective.
Tell me, friends, how we do this well! To be both liberal and moderate at the same time? How we are liberal precisely because much of conservative Christianity is so unrepresentative of the wider population. That over ninety percent of the people in some charismatic denominations are conservative, but the communities they serve are not. And yet, this gets to be “a side” and mainline gets to be “the other.”
5. The Other Political Divide: Mainstream vs. a Conservative Alternative
The underreported division of the last four decades has been this one. While we treat everything as right vs. left, we fail to understand precisely how this dividing works when one “half” doesn’t represent half of the world, but attempts to be an alternative or replacement to that world itself.
Consider the phrase “alternative facts” from a decade ago. This was a political attempt to offer, not truth, or a difference of opinion, but to argue that there were whole alternative (and, unspoken: objective) facts. There are only facts, right? But to offer alternative facts, we can have two sets of facts and not just opinions. Facts that would compete in “the marketplace of ideas.”
This was an update of the political designs in the late 1990s and ‘00s to develop conservative alternative frameworks — which were outgrowths of the 1960s-’80s projects of alternative schools, think tanks, media, law schools, etc. Projects to create alternatives that could expand and eventually replace.
In creating an alternative system, modern conservatism has created more than infrastructure or ideological frameworks. They have created an environment separate from the mainstream that can be 100% conservative within itself as both refuge and centerpiece of the wider conservative project.
Meanwhile, the mainstream, with its messy need to negotiate varieties of voices, constituencies, cultures, priorities, beliefs, and yes, politics, now represents “the other side.” Everything else gets to be liberal.
So the middle becomes the left. And the left also becomes the middle.
Do you see this is all a matter of definitions and relative position to others? That being a representative space is also about being intentionally in a space of connection with others? But that this isn’t a liberal trait? Like the ballot box, it is a place where all people can be heard.
Do you see that we aren’t doing liberal things when we promote democracy, for example? Or when we allow more people to have access within the church? Or quote Jesus? Welcome and protect immigrants?
And yet, here we are.
Conservative churches align with the alternative ecosystem, setting themselves apart from the mainstream and also claiming to be half of it. Or better: the true form. The conservative project wants us left/right sorting the world because it benefits them more and costs them less.
This is the same methodology from the constitutional convention when slave states wanted to count slaves as people for representation but not for citizenship. To claim the political power and yet not have to share it with all of their people. A delicate lie ordered, not by belief or the absolute truth of personhood, but to control the federal government from the beginning. Overrepresented in the capital while underrepresenting their own people.
6. Helping Professions Have Become Liberal Coded
Given all of the problems with accounting for the political, historical, and spiritual makeup of the congregation in relationship to the culture, we should probably also acknowledge the challenge of leading in the mainline.
This may be the most obvious reality of them all: that being a professional who cares for the health of others right now is very liberal coded. While Burge is looking at the results of the moment and saying there must be a breakdown in the system somewhere, the simpler response is asking who would do this now? Looking not only at the political makeup of the church, but the ideological convictions of the people.
What traditionally conservative parents are hoping their kid grows up to be a Methodist minister or a Presbyterian pastor? At a time when the political position of the governing party is to get fewer kids to go to college, what conservative parents want their kids to get a professional graduate degree? Who is encouraging their 18 year-old to go to seven years of college?
The same can be said of teachers and social workers.
Or any position historically underpaid and requiring high levels of education. And these professions have something else in common: high levels of personal sacrifice, low levels of compensation, and decreasing public prestige. And even more to the point — being targeted by conservative activists.
Helping professions, as they represent a public-facing generous posture and require educational attainment while representing the most middle-of-the-road vocations holding the political tensions graciously, are the most mainstream normal professions in our culture. Which also, given #5 above, makes them “liberal jobs.” **
It isn’t that conservatives aren’t allowed to be mainline pastors. I have met a lot over the years. In that same time, what it means to be conservative has changed. And so has what conservative parents have guided their children to do with their lives.
7. Positive Representational Leadership
If you listen to the Homebrewed interview, you will hear a dialectical approach. Ryan Burge presents his findings and his conservative evangelical frame. Tripp offers a left mainline frame. And the two joyfully tag each other with their different takes. It represents both an old-school approach to dialogue and a welcome respite from the forceful I’m-right-you’re-wrong of the post-Crossfire world. It is a necessary corrective.
And yet also missing from the conversation is what all of our political frame overlays we put on our faith are doing to our brains. The simple fact that liberal leaders should be good leaders of a mainline congregation. And conservative members should be generally happy with the results. For the same reason that political affiliations don’t inherently interfere with performance.
We must renormalize this truth. Precisely because it is the negative examples that are exceptions that prove the rule.
Much like speaking of the welcoming of immigrants was not politically divisive until 2016, but saying it now is Biblically responsible. And preaching this truth is being coded as liberal and hearing this truth as a conservative is coded as out of bounds. Where is the gospel, the truth, the politics, the Dream of God in this? It should be easy enough to see — if we try.
The Truth Can Be Hard to Accept
The truth in Burge’s argument is no less true the more we dig into it. There is a big gap in political affiliation between church leaders in the mainline and the laity. It is there in the data. And most can observe it (if they know enough clergy). We’ve discussed it in the church for years.
And yet, what that gap actually reveals is not nearly as clear. And if it actually measures something worth more than a mere curiosity of trivia is also fuzzy.
But what we see when we take in the context, the history, the political moment, the way we define things, how we define ourselves, the cultural priorities, and all that comes from it, is a lot harder for the mainline’s critics to accept.
It is much easier to measure decline as a failure of the mainline rather than corruptions of other institutions or the rise of political convictions. To take a moment to realize how the definitions we count on to measure our institutions fall apart under direct scrutiny.
We have to be honest.
There is no doubt that decline hit the mainline half a century ago. As it has hit every segment of the Christian landscape in the 21st century.
The tools we’re given to measure that decline, however, stem from assumptions just like Burge’s. Assumptions which are not universally applied or represent objective truths. They tend to be things conservatives want to hear, moderates want to change, and liberals want to overcome. But they don’t stem from an objective truth. They are, after all, assumptions.
Usually they are out of context or rely on a coherent and consistent depiction of modern politics. And instead, we have change. Simple excuses and deceptions and motivations and convictions and hearsays.
And, among it all, we still have Jesus’s Way of Love. Which may be the harder truth for some to accept. And for others to embody.
In the end it seems as if Christians have a far easier time defining ourselves and others with the arbitrary and constantly evolving lens of American politics than we do calling each other people of faith.
Note
** Being a pastor in conservative spaces is esteemed. This is how the alternative space works. Within the conservative space, the vocation and all it requires is esteemed. But in the mainstream, neutral spaces, the requirements are treated as liberal. Education is one. So is high emotional intelligence, generosity, and a willingness to accomodate others.
Notice, too, that these are also the differences between conservative churches and the mainline. Conservative churches value certainty and security. Pastors don’t have to be good listeners, really, because they bear the truth. Less teacher or nonprofit leader and more CEO.
The alternative gets the rhetorical power of being right without the public responsibility of caring for the lives of others.
