Mainline Protestantism

Mainline Protestantism is not a church. It has no shared confession, no governing council and no single form of church government: the Episcopal Church keeps bishops and dioceses, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) keeps elders and presbyteries, and the United Church of Christ keeps its member congregations fully autonomous. What binds these bodies together is a classification, not an institution. The Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape Study sorts American Protestant respondents into one of three traditions based on the specific denomination they name: evangelical, mainline, or historically Black Protestant. A Southern Baptist is classified evangelical. A member of the National Baptist Convention, USA, is classified historically Black Protestant. A member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America or the United Church of Christ is classified mainline, whatever that person's own personal theology happens to be. The category groups denominations, not individual beliefs.

Historian William R. Hutchison gave the tradition's most institutionally prominent members a name in his 1989 essay collection Between the Times: the Seven Sisters of American Protestantism, seven denominations that dominated American religious, civic and educational life through the mid twentieth century. Compared with the evangelical tradition, mainline churches tend to hold a less exclusive account of salvation, treat historical critical Biblical scholarship as compatible with faith rather than a threat to it, and put a comparatively public emphasis on social reform. None of that makes mainline Protestantism a single thing to believe. It names a family of institutions with a shared historical position in American public life, not a shared creed.

The tradition's institutional expression began to organize in 1908, when thirty two Christian communions met in Philadelphia to form the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, the first sustained cooperative body across what would become the mainline denominations. William R. Hutchison's 1989 book named the tradition's seven most institutionally dominant members the Seven Sisters of American Protestantism: the American Baptist Churches USA, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the United Church of Christ, and the United Methodist Church.

This atlas currently holds six of the seven as full entities: the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), recorded here as Disciples of Christ, each with its own description, comparable facts and sourced edges into the Christian tradition. One is not yet an entity here: the American Baptist Churches USA, a loosely federated body whose individual congregations and regions retain wide autonomy over their own positions. Naming that gap honestly, rather than filing it under a denomination it is not, is what the family classification exists to make possible: six real member churches, sourced and comparable, standing under one honestly labeled family, with the one still missing named rather than silently absent.