Like many mainline Protestant institutions, the National Council of Churches has had a rough couple of years. Once the public face of American Protestantism, the NCC is now just another face in the crowd. Yet with new leadership and a retooled mission, the NCC is poised to rebound from its low ebb of influence and carries a great deal of promise into the future.
In its 1950s heyday, the NCC embodied the confident spirit of educated, mainstream religious elites in what was still largely a Protestant nation. The NCC regularly brought bishops and denominational leaders to the White House and boasted significant influence over members of Congress. Mainline theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr were renowned public intellectuals, practically household names.
It was an ecumenical age as well as denominations were merging, not splintering. The baby boom and sustained economic prosperity enabled the historic denominations’ demographic strength. Beautiful churches sprang up along suburban commuter corridors such as Philadelphia’s Main Line (from which the term “mainline” arises). Fundamentalist and other literal-Bible traditions, comprised largely of uneducated pastors and downscale laity, operated beneath the notice of elite media and were still presumed to be in a post-Scopes cultural withdrawal.
For a few mid-century decades, the American norm of partisan political polarization softened. There were progressive Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress, and the NCC lobbied them all. Before ideology, party, and theology became so strongly correlated (especially for Protestants), the NCC claimed to speak for a broad swath of American society.
What happened?
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SOURCE: Jacob Lupfer
Religion News Service
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