Are We Witnessing the Collapse of Evangelicalism in Real Time?

When I was growing up in the 1980s in both urban Chicago and then Michigan, where I spent my teen years, Evangelical churches were quite literally...everywhere.

Whether Baptist, Presbyterian, non-denominational, Charismatic, Pentecostal, or fill-in-the-blank, it seemed like everywhere you turned there were Evangelical churches that dotted the landscape like the pigeons that meander the streets of Michigan Avenue in the Windy City. Yet, just like the Passenger Pigeon, which suddenly disappeared overnight and no longer exists, it seems as though the Evangelical Christianity of my youth is going extinct right before our eyes.

Consider the statistics,

According to the Pew Research Center, people who identify as either Protestant or Evangelical have dropped from 33% of U.S. society in 1999 to somewhere between 10–13% now.

Those statistics track with my own anecdotal evidence, as when I was a young adult in the ‘90s, I would definitely attest to the idea that it felt like 1 in 3 people I met at coffee houses were some kind of Evangelical sort-of-person, whereas nowadays, it seems at best 1 in 10 people I meet would consider themselves in that category.

Numerous friends of mine I’ve known for over thirty years who grew up Charismatic Christian, Pentecostal, non-denominational, or Baptist have reached out to me in recent years to tell me they are now considering Roman Catholicism, some have converted to Orthodox Christianity, and others are attending far more liturgical Protestant churches than the Evangelical style of their youth.

The Southern Baptist Convention, once the poster child for Evangelicalism in the United States, now comprises less than 5% of the entire population.

Objectively, from a historical perspective, Evangelical Christianity is a very new flavor. It popped into existence in the early to mid-1800s through the revivalism of what is referred to as the Second Great Awakening. And with it came radical changes to the landscape of American and Western societal Christianity.

Prior to the 19th century, it was unlikely anyone would a comment like, “There are 45,000 different Protestant denominations,” as is the common refrain these days from Roman Catholic apologists who are quick to use that as a talking point against the Protestant Reformation and what it wrought.

Prior to the revivalism of the 1700s and then the 1800s, Protestant Christianity was largely liturgical and generally subdivided into major categories: Scottish Presbyterianism, English Anglicanism, German Lutheranism, and the Swiss Reformers. Sure, there were others, like the Puritans who attempted to purify the Church of England, the Quakers and Separatists who simply wanted to do their own thing, and other splinter groups, but for the most part, Western Protestant Christianity was still largely understood to be a handful of main categories, in many ways still connected to nations, thrones, and government.

As congregationalism sprung up like wildfire alongside the revivalist movements, liturgy gave way to emotion, and Evangelicalism began to find its identity in feeling, expression, and a general abhorrence of ancient tradition.

Nearly twenty years ago, on March 9, 2009, the late Michael Spencer, AKA The Internet Monk, wrote an article that went viral entitled “The Coming Evangelical Collapse,” in which he predicted rather well what we are witnessing here in 2026.

After listing all of the failures of Evangelicalism, the brand of Christianity Spencer loved, he then predicted who would gain in the wake of its collapse. He writes,

“Two of the beneficiaries will be the Roman Catholic and Orthodox communions. Evangelicals have been entering these churches in recent decades and that trend will continue, with more efforts aimed at the “conversion” of Evangelicals to the Catholic and Orthodox traditions.”

If that isn’t a prescient prediction, I don’t know what is, as that is exactly what we have been witnessing the last few years, and what I’ve been writing about here on Becoming Orthodox for some time.

Rarely a week goes by that our local parish doesn’t get scores of visitors from various Evangelical traditions who have never visited an Orthodox Church and who are very interested in becoming part of our community.

While Evangelical mega-churches date back to the 1920s with the advent of Pentecostalism, it wasn’t until the 1990s that they became the mainstay of suburban evangelicalism. I can remember when they began popping up during the early 1990s. Willow Creek in Chicago, and then Saddleback Church in California, became the template programs in teaching suburban evangelicals “how to do church.”

These mega-churches, instead of converting atheists or non-church attenders, largely drew attendees from other evangelical churches in the area, so that a type of consolidation took place; as the mega-churches grew, the smaller Evangelical churches either got with the program or went out of business.

I saved a pamphlet from one I visited in 1995 as an 18 year old young man, and I was appalled at the cover: “This Ain’t Your Momma’s Church!” A friend of mine invited me to visit the mega-church she’d been attending, and as I walked into the massive atrium (the building reminded me of a professional NBA arena and was nearly as large), I was handed a glossy color pamphlet by a greeter and was shocked that a church that billed itself as “Christian” would take a swipe at other Protestant churches in the area; the pamphlet had a picture of a crying kid at what looked like a traditional stained-glass-window Protestant church. And when you turned it over, it went on to excoriate Protestant evangelical churches that sang hymns, had pews, and were “old.”

My friend who attended that mega-church didn’t seem to mind that as the lights went dark, instead of leading the congregation in a hymn with Christian prose, the band sang a song by the popular singer-songwriter at the time, Jewel. There was a ten-minute TED Talk sandwiched in the middle of the hour, followed by a full skit put on by what seemed like professionally paid actors, and then the “worship service,” if we can call it that, was closed out by the rock band on stage performing a famous song by the Beatles.

I’d never seen anything like this in something called “church” before. It’s not that I believe that the mega-church leaders, or even Protestant Evangelicals in general, were trying to abandon Christianity; I think they were sincerely trying to retain the faith in the midst of a fast-moving culture. Yet what developed from the time of revivalism to the 21st century was, by and large, a tradition that moved further and further away from the worship and practices of the first-century Church.

Previously, you might have had suburban evangelicals spread out among multiple Baptist, non-denominational, and other types of churches that may have had a hundred or a few hundred members. With the mega-church movement, many of those churches closed up shop as their congregants migrated to larger stadium-like buildings that were more modern, had in-house coffee shops, movie theater seating, better sound systems, lighting, and more.

Evangelical churches from the 1970s and 1980s that didn’t get with the program started feeling dated. Like the tri-level Brady Bunch house of the 1970s or wallpaper, people wanted something fresh; something that felt like it was up to date.

But the mega-church movement wasn’t going to last any more than the version of the 1920s, which gave us people like Aimee Semple McPherson and others. Ultimately, people would eventually see through the facade and ask themselves,

“Is this really the kind of Christianity that the first-century Apostles envisioned standing the test of time? Christianity that involves movie screens, auditoriums, skits, and TED Talks? Is that really the worship of the Bible?”

We should have known there was a sell-by date for Evangelicalism.

How could something which, for 200 years, rarely focused on whether or not they were practicing a worship that was rooted in the first century Apostolic world, would eventually find itself with scores of congregants who, after reading the Bible, might ask questions like that.

While I still positively love and have fond memories of the Methodism I grew up in during my youth, I often asked myself, even as a teenager, “Why do we exclusively sing 18th- and 19th-century hymns each Sunday as though that was the climax of Christianity?”

Modern Evangelicalism thought the same question and gave us modern songs; first the Pentecostal ditties of the early twentieth century, and eventually the Charismatic worship of the 1970s that led to the contemporary worship of the current generation.

Yet whether it is the 19th-century Methodist hymns or the Hillsong rock ballads of today, none of that is rooted in the religion of the Apostles. They reflect more the attitude and ideas of people who were more concerned with feeling than reflection.

This isn’t to say I don’t appreciate the hymns of my youth or the contemporary songs of today. But they are simply not the worship rooted in the theology of Scripture.

There is a reason that the two ancient strands of Christianity in both the Eastern and Western Rites have both preserved the Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, which is simply the very liturgy that came from Saint James the Apostle.

Can we say with a straight face that a modern contemporary church service truly reflects the way Saint James, the brother of Jesus, taught his followers to worship God? Yet if you attend an Orthodox Church, an old-rite Roman Catholic service, or even an Oriental Orthodox Church, you will see a liturgy, prayers, and hymnography that are deeply connected to what Saint James handed down to his followers who then handed it down in succession to each concurrent generation.

This, as I have said in numerous essays over the past couple of years, is a huge driving factor in what brings a great many people into our local parish.

But there is more to it than simply “worshipping God in the manner the Apostles taught.” You see, the claim of the ancient Church isn’t simply, “We retain the worship of the first century.” The claim is far deeper and more important; it is that through the worship of the Liturgy given to us by the Apostles, spiritual healing of soul and body takes place.

That is the whole point of Orthodox Christianity. The Church is a hospital, and we, the people, need healing.

One of my close friends called yesterday after celebrating the Feast of the Transfiguration, and their voice was overflowing with joy and peace after spending hours in the church sanctuary experiencing the rhythm and flow of ancient worship.

• Worship that is not designed to entertain, but to heal.

• Worship that is not designed to excite, but to help us meditate.

• Worship that is not designed to ignite the passions, but to calm them.

Of course, this does not mean the Holy Spirit is only present at Orthodox Churches. I am neither a theologian nor someone who would make such a claim. As Orthodox Christians, we pray the prayer every day, “Heavenly King, Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, who art everywhere present, and fillest all things…”

And we truly believe that; the Holy Spirit fills all, and is everywhere.

~ Kenneth

Occasionally, in comments and emails I am characterized as being uncharitable to the Evangelicalism of my youth. However, I try to do my best at sharing how thankful I am for the tradition I grew up in, the blessing that it was to my life, and how it brought me to where I am now.

It is a strange thing to get comments and emails from people who accuse me of being critical of Evangelicalism, when that tradition has spent two hundred years being critical of ancient forms of Christianity.

I would never write an essay saying “Evangelicals can’t be saved”, yet if you walked into a typical Evangelical baptist church circa yesteryear, you would likely hear a sermon condemning Roman Catholicism as the “whore of Babylon” and it’s congregants being “guilty of idolatry and headed to hell”.

I’ve never been a Baptist, and only visited one or two back in my youth, but I had plenty of Baptist acquaintances throughout my youth and one of their most common refrains was that Roman Catholics were not saved.

I grew up in the 1990’s where I sat at coffee houses with people from many different threads of Christianity and other religions. We would sit long into the night, week after week, discussing worship, theology, philosophy and politics and nobody ever got their nose bent out of shape.

For some reason, during this surge or wave of inquiry into Orthodox Christianity, it has ignited some people (not all) to thinking that it is wrong to be critical of Protestantism or Evangelicalism. “Why do you keep writing about this and complaining about it Kenneth!” people say to me in my emails.

The answer to that question is rather simple; because that is what I grew up in. Because the landscape of Western Culture throughout much of the 20th century, not just the religious landscape, but the political and cultural ethos of our society was entirely dominated by Evangelical Christianity.

Why wouldn’t I write about something that was so central to Western Culture, yet is now rapidly disappearing, and in many ways, has left a lot of people feeling lost in its wake.

I pray that you, gentle reader, will forgive me where I have ever been un-needfully critical, and see that in all things, my heart is to simply seek the truth in open minded and thoughtful discussion.

Thank you for your prayers, encouragement, support, and more. For those who are able to financial support this work, I am eternally grateful for you. These essays and the work that goes on here at Becoming Orthodox is practically a full time job, and we have bills to pay that never seem to stop coming. Thank you.

If you find these weekly musings rewarding, and only if you have the available means, you might consider purchasing a paid subscription. I do not put any essays behind paywalls because of how I was raised; my father instilled within me the idea that anything related to our faith should not have a price tag on it as a requirement.

Nonetheless, a great deal of time goes into the planning, writing, and editing of these essays, and I am forever grateful to those who have the financial means to support me. Thank you.