The Decline of Midwestern Evangelicalism

The announcement this week that Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) is merging with Canada’s Trinity Western University and leaving the United States is one more reminder of the steep decline of northern evangelicalism in general and midwestern evangelicalism in particular.

Over the past two generations, American Protestant Christianity has become overwhelmingly southern. Of the six largest Protestant seminaries in the United States (the only ones with full-time enrollments over 1,000), all but one are located in the South. And the one that is not is the exception that proves the rule: It’s Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, which is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention and therefore hardly representative of historic midwestern evangelicalism.

Fifty years ago, the situation was very different. The institution that now operates the nation’s largest seminary – Liberty University – barely existed; it was a newly founded, struggling, tiny fundamentalist Baptist college that few people had ever heard of. What is now America’s second largest seminary – Southern Baptist Theological Seminary – was not yet in the evangelical orbit; its professors were some of the most progressive in a Southern Baptist Convention that had not yet experienced a conservative takeover, and their theology tended more toward neo-orthodoxy or even moderate liberalism rather than toward the evangelicalism that characterized leading northern institutions such as Wheaton, Gordon-Conwell, and TEDS.

So, fifty years ago, if a person wanted to find the intellectual center of gravity in the evangelical movement, they probably would not have gone to the South. Instead, they might have looked to Fuller Theological Seminary, which, when it was founded in 1947, aspired to be the evangelical equivalent of Princeton Theological Seminary, and which by the 1970s was an undisputed intellectual powerhouse in evangelicalism – though one that was also increasingly controversial because of its abandonment of more conservative definitions of inerrancy. They might have looked at Gordon-Conwell – a centrist, ironically Reformed, evangelical institution that counted among its students in the mid-1970s both Michael Ford (President Gerald Ford’s son) and Tim and Kathy Keller. Or, they might have looked to Wheaton or TEDS, both of which were leading representatives of midwestern evangelicalism.

The institutions of northern evangelicalism stretched from coast to coast (that is, from Boston to Los Angeles), but the movement’s intellectual center of gravity was in the Midwest – namely, the Chicago area and Grand Rapids. Grand Rapids, of course, had the leading institutions of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC): Calvin College (now Calvin University) and the publishing powerhouses of Zondervan and Eerdmans. But although the CRC had an intellectual influence on northern evangelicalism that vastly outstripped its small size, the fact that the conservative Protestant institutions were the product of only a single denomination – and one that had very limited influence in Wesleyan circles – meant that it could never be the geographic center of an intellectually engaged evangelical movement. Instead, that center was Chicago.

Chicago was where the National Association of Evangelicals was formed in 1942. It was where Moody Bible Institute and TEDS were located. It was where the “Chicago Statement” on biblical inerrancy was signed in 1978. Its suburbs were home to Wheaton College, Christianity Today, Intervarsity Press, Tyndale, and Crossway.

For at least a generation, from the 1940s through the 1970s, numerous American evangelical thought leaders made their way through Chicago at some point in their careers. Carl Henry taught there. Billy Graham went to college there. Even those who never lived in Chicago – like Francis Schaeffer, for instance – published their books with Chicago-based presses or, as Schaeffer did, changed the course of American evangelicalism through the public addresses they gave at Wheaton College.

In a testament to Chicago’s influence over American evangelicalism, Democratic candidate George McGovern (who himself had attended Garrett Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois) chose to come to the Chicago area and speak at Wheaton when he wanted to appeal to young evangelical voters. One of those who heard him speak was the TEDS student Jim Wallis, who helped launch Evangelicals for McGovern (an early voice for the politics of progressive evangelicalism) with other evangelical academics and seminary students from the Chicago area. Chicago’s evangelical students and seminarians at the time included both conservatives and progressives, but regardless of where they were on the ideological spectrum, if they were evangelical, there was a good chance that they would want to study in Chicago. To reach America’s evangelical academics, there was no better place to go than the Windy City and its evangelical-dotted suburbs.

Those days are now long in the past. In more recent years, when presidential candidates have tried to reach out to evangelicals, they have rarely gone to Chicago. Instead, they have gone to Liberty University or some other Christian college or megachurch in the Sunbelt. The Midwest is no longer the center of American evangelicalism, which means that Chicago evangelical institutions no longer have the intellectual influence they once did. Most Chicago-area evangelical educational institutions that have survived are facing enrollment challenges. And some of the publishers that still remain in Chicago rely mainly on staff members who have relocated to the Bible Belt.

In the 1970s, the nation’s most influential megachurch was arguably the suburban Chicago-based Willow Creek Church. But today, eighteen of the twenty largest megachurches in the United States (according to Hartford Institute for Religion Research’s database) are located in the Sunbelt, and none of the top twenty are located anywhere near Chicago.

What happened to midwestern evangelicalism?

The answer may be surprising: The strength of midwestern evangelicalism was very closely tied to the strength of mainline Protestantism – and when mainline Protestantism declined, midwestern evangelicalism could not sustain itself.

In contrast to the South, where the massive Southern Baptist Convention has long exercised an outsized influence over all other denominations in the region, northern evangelicalism was never dominated by a single denomination. Some northern evangelicals were part of small fundamentalist denominations that had separated from the mainline in the early twentieth century. A few were part of small denominations (such as the CRC or the Evangelical Free Church) that were the product of small ethnic enclaves that had been largely untouched by theological liberalism or the fundamentalist-modernist splits of the early twentieth-century mainline. But large numbers of others were conservatives within the mainline.

Because northern evangelicals came from a wide diversity of theological backgrounds, they developed a mostly ecumenical disposition about the sort of doctrines that had sparked sharp divisions among Protestants in other settings. Baptism, for instance, was never much of an issue for most northern evangelicals of the mid twentieth century; the lines between Presbyterianism and the Baptist tradition were fairly porous. Nor did Wesleyan Arminians come to blows with Reformed Protestants; evangelical institutions like Wheaton College didn’t make such matters a dividing line, and they were quite willing to hire faculty from both sides of the debate.

Instead, northern evangelicalism of the mid-twentieth century acted as a “big tent” that could comfortably accommodate most theologically conservative Protestants. Among the intellectual leaders of mid twentieth-century northern evangelicalism were Baptists like Carl Henry, Presbyterians like James Montgomery Boice, and Lutherans like John Warwick Montgomery. Many of them had no qualms about crossing denominational boundaries, as Henrietta Mears did, for instance, when she moved from William Bell Riley’s First Baptist Church in Minneapolis to a Presbyterian church in California.

And many of them were the product of multiple denominational influences over the years. This was the case for TEDS’s influential dean Kenneth Kantzer, who arguably did more than anyone else to make the institution a center of intellectually engaged evangelicalism. Raised by Lutheran parents, he then had a conversion experience at the Brethren Church-affiliated Ashland College because of an encounter with a classmate from the League of Evangelical Students, an organization associated with the conservative wing of the Presbyterian Church (USA). He then joined the Evangelical Free Church and became dean at the denomination’s flagship seminary, but used his position to bring in evangelical scholars from multiple denominational traditions.

If many northern evangelicals thought little of denominational distinctives, they united around the banner of defending a conservative view of scripture – which, for many of them, eventually became codified as inerrancy. That commitment could be maintained in a mainline denomination just as well as a fundamentalist one, because northern evangelicals didn’t have to be part of a denomination that affirmed biblical inerrancy to uphold its primacy as a first-order doctrine. Carl Henry, for instance, was a member of the Northern Baptist Convention, which did not affirm biblical inerrancy. James Montgomery Boice pastored a church that was affiliated with the mainline northern Presbyterian denomination that is now known as the Presbyterian Church (USA), but that was then called the United Presbyterian Church.

But regardless of their particular denominational affiliation, they arguably felt a greater kinship with other evangelicals who shared their belief in biblical inerrancy than they did with members of their own denomination who did not. Perhaps for that reason, northern evangelicalism was characterized more by parachurch organizations, educational institutions, and publishing houses than by the establishment of particular denominations.

But this lack of denominational affiliation proved to be the Achilles heel of northern evangelicalism. Northern evangelicalism in general – and midwestern evangelicalism in particular – was strongest when much of the midwestern heartland was filled with moderately conservative Methodist, Lutheran, and Presbyterian churches where plenty of the congregants were still evangelical and where large swaths of the population (whether theologically conservative or theologically liberal) still attended church. In 1971, for instance, 40 percent of Midwesterners attended church each week, which was almost as high as the 45 percent of those who did so in the South.

But today, while monthly church attendance rates in much of the South have remained at 33 percent or higher, they have fallen in the Midwest, with only 20 percent of Ohioans reporting in 2024 that they attend church at least once a month.

While the “Great Dechurching” has arguably affected every region of the country, its impact on the Midwest has been disproportionately high. As a result, there isn’t enough of a mainline Protestant structure to sustain much of a conservative minority party, and the distinctively evangelical denominations of the Midwest have too small a constituency to sustain all of the evangelical institutions in the region.

This is an unfortunate loss for evangelicalism, not because it means the demise of evangelicalism (it does not), but because it means that the future of a southernized evangelicalism will be very different from the ecumenical northern evangelicalism that shaped much of evangelical culture from the 1940s to the 1970s. Northern evangelicalism was characterized by strong battles for the primacy and authority of scripture, but broad tolerance on a host of other matters. It was intellectually engaged and borrowed heavily from British Protestant thinkers (such as John Stott and C. S. Lewis) as it attempted to steer a middle course between fundamentalism and liberal Protestantism. While fostering the idea of cultural engagement, it was rarely politically belligerent – perhaps because it was shaped by an irenic conservatism rather than the culture wars of the late twentieth century.

But because it lacked a very strong ecclesiology or the ecclesiastical institutions that could sustain it, it depended largely on a widely churched, broadly Christian culture to maintain its vibrancy. When Midwesterners left mainline Protestant churches in droves, midwestern evangelicalism fell on hard times.

TEDS is merely the latest casualty in this decline. As a pillar of midwestern evangelicalism, it was the product of a particular era – and now that that era has passed, there is apparently no longer a midwestern evangelical constituency that is large enough to sustain it.

Photo credit: York United Methodist Church, Medina County, Ohio (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NRHP-York_United_Methodist_Church-Full.jpg).