Chris at Even the Devils Believe has a good post on birth rates and evangelism in mainline Protestantism, jumping off from the recent comments from Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori about how Episcopalians aren’t incresing their numbers due to the low birth rates among “better-educated” people who care about preserving the earth.

Leaving aside the condescending tone of those remarks toward our Catholic and Mormon friends, Chris correctly points out the whistling-past-the-graveyard nature of this attitude. He also notes that Christianity is not exclusively, or even primarily, a religion that propagates itself by inheritance, but by evangelism, which is where mainline Protestantism has been falling down on the job. And it needn’t be a matter of “liberalism,” narrowly defined as churches who have centrist-to-liberal stances on the usual litany of issues.

While I try to resist sweeping generalization about “postmodernism” or what “postmodern” people are supposedly like, I think that one thing that can be said is that postmodern people, outside of a relatively small band of committed secularists, are open to an experience of the transcendent. The closed clockwork universe of high modernism probably never had much of a hold on most people’s minds, but it’s also lost much of whatever intellectual justification it once had. I’ve argued before that “supernaturalism” is not what keeps people away from religion. When theologians decry rampant “secularism” I sometimes think that’s because they are taking their academic colleagues as representative of the population as a whole.

But, however important it may be to engage secularist or hard-core “naturalist” thought, that’s simply not where most people are coming from (the same might be said of “postmodern” thought, which is still largely confined to the academy, but that’s a topic for another day). So, if there is a “liberalism” (or maybe “modernism” is a better word) that’s at fault here, I think it might be the variety which downplays the transcendent, or “vertical,” aspect of faith in an attempt to appeal to “modern” people.