It's nearly an article of faith among those who study religion in the U.S.: Mainline, moderate-to-liberal Protestant churches are losing members while evangelical denominations are growing due to the strictness of the evangelicals' conservative theology. "If it costs nothing to belong to a community, it can't be worth much," wrote Dean Kelley in 1972 in Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, in which he decried mainline churches as too lenient. But is strictness the attraction of evangelicals? Are liberal churches destined to lose members?

Maybe not. Sociologist John H. Evans of the University of California, San Diego, tested an alternate explanation, with intriguing results. What if churches attract members by offering a sense of identity, conservative or liberal? Evans focused on the mainline Presbyterian Church (USA). He studied three surveys on the theology espoused by churches across the U.S., and matched his findings with census and membership data from all 50 states.

He discovered that membership in Presbyterian churches that offer a clear identity, generally theologically liberal, is holding steady. Evans calls this "maintaining the tensions." First, the churches embrace the ways they differ from the general culture: "Although an evangelical might feel that there is no difference between a mainline Protestant and a secular person, in fact, mainline Protestants are anything but secular," writes Evans in The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (Vol. 42, No. 3). At the same time, these churches "draw boundaries against theological conservatives by having an identity as a theological liberal."

It seems that the secret to attracting members may be the one parents often tell children as they head off into the world: Be who you really are.

Subscribe to Spirituality & Health