Money quote from Michael's analysis:
Evangelicals are at best currently treading water. Their inflows have been matched by outflows, albeit coming from different sources. Much to my surprise, Evangelicals and Mainline Protestants have in fact been swapping members, I had expected much more of a move from Mainline Protestants to Evangelicals. This has not been the case as 2.6% of Americans have moved from Evangelical to Mainline and 2.5% have moved back the other way. More on this later in the post.
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Interesting...
I await the batcomputer results for those who belong to a religious group and actually receive salvation and admittance into heaven...any data on this?
Yep the datas in...no former evangelicals are currently in heaven. Weird.
That's because our idea of paradise means not having to put up with evangelicals, so we got our own. ;-)
Mainline/evangelical lines are so hard to draw -- they're real, don't get me wrong, I totally see them as real lines, but in my experience it's so much more of a "you know it when you see it" sort of thing than anything susceptible to a helpful operational definition. Denominational lines are only sort of useful as there are evangelical congregations within mainline denominations. There are American Baptist congregations that are definitely mainline and American Baptist congregations that are definitely mainline. What is a sociologist to do?
So to pick a high profile example, John Ortberg is now at Menlo Park Presbyterian (PCUSA) -- so I bet he'd show up as a "former evangelical" in these numbers. But that's misleading.
I still see baptists as being pretty far away from mainline.
Then again, I see believers in Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide as being hetrodox and pretty far away from the Kingdom of Christ in Church Militant, Church Suffering, and Church Triumphant (not to mention, scripturally ignorant as the Bible itself defines the Word of God as Christ, not Scripture, and the only place you'll find "faith alone" is in the epistle of James preceded by the words "not by").
There is a reason Orthodoxy is hard.
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