On my way out of the library the other day, my eye was caught by J. Bottum’s latest, provocatively titled article, “The Death of Protestant America”. Unlike in the case of his writing on the death penalty, I wasn’t left stupider after reading this article (D.A. can testify to this!), but it did prove considerably less exciting than the title. Basically, he reflects on the figures and studies which indicate that the old protestant mainline churches – the Episcopalians, the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Lutherans – are rapidly dwindling in membership. Then, he wonders what sort of civic life will be able to exist in this country once the protestant backbone of the nation, which provided a sort of common moral vision, has been completely broken. Okay, great. There doesn’t seem to be anything particularly Catholic about his analysis or about what he thinks will (or, more importantly, ought) to fill the void. I hope that I’m wrong, but my impression is that the type of vision expressed here is wholly foreign to Bottum’s way of thinking.

Now, on the other hand, what I really like about the article (ha!) is when in his sort of objective, sort of dispassionate way, he slams the liberals of the mainline. His words about the Episcopalians I found especially enjoyable. He takes Katherine Jefferts Schori as his theme for meditation:

The Episcopal Church used to be “larger percentagewise,” the current presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, admitted to the New York Times at the end of 2006. “But Episcopalians tend to be better educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates than some other denominations. Roman Catholics and Mormons both have theological reasons for producing lots of children.” Episcopalians, she said, aren’t interested in replenishing their ranks by having children—indeed, “it’s probably the opposite. We encourage ­people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their portion.” Applauding her parents’ decision to leave the Catholic Church and become Episcopalians when she was nine, Bishop Schori added, “I think my parents were looking for a place where wrestling with questions was encouraged rather than discouraged.”

Schori is by no means a radical, as such things are counted these days in the Episcopal Church—the home, after all, of V. Gene Robinson, the openly homosexual bishop of New Hampshire, and John Shelby Spong, the retired bishop of Newark, who has denied even the possibility of meaningful prayer. She seems, rather, a fairly typical liberal Protestant: a rentier, really, living off the income from the property her predecessors purchased, strolling at sunset along the strand as the great tide of the Mainline ebbs further out to sea. [Bottum, that's beautifully poetic!]

To be saved, we need only to realize that God already loves us, just the way we are, Schori wrote in her 2006 book, A Wing and a Prayer. She’s not exactly wrong about God’s love, but, in Schori’s happy soteriology, such love demands from us no personal ­reformation, no individual guilt, no particular penance, and no precise dogma. All we have to do, to prove the redemption we already have, is support the political causes she approves. The mission of the church is to show forth God’s love by demanding inclusion and social justice. She often points to the United Nations as an example of God’s work in the world [ROL!], and when she talks about the mission of the Episcopal Church, she typically identifies it with the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals.

Her Yahweh, in other words, is a blend of Norman Vincent Peale and Dag Hammarskjöld. And through it all you can hear the notes of Bishop Pike—not the lyrics, perhaps, but always the melody. There’s the same cringe-making assumption of social superiority: “Episcopalians tend to be better-educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates” than the lower classes of Catholics and Mormons. For that matter, there’s the same unselfconscious declaration of superiority even to faith: We’re theologically more advanced precisely because we don’t have a theology—we have “a place where wrestling with questions” is “encouraged rather than discouraged.”

I remember reading those lines from Schori about Episcopalians breeding less when they first came out. To someone bitten by the Steyn demography bug, her words seem especially naive. But even if you don’t think that the Muslims are going to bring Europe in the next fifty years into the Dar-al-Islam through the power of reproduction, you can still see that the liberal tribe isn’t long for this world (the power of the lack of reproduction). They talk endlessly of sustainability, but they can’t even sustain their own ranks – children are the easiest converts, or the toughest, as they obviously see it.