To the Journal editor:

And I must tell you, with great respect for the effort being displayed, this thing is over.

Mainline protestantism has been bleeding out since 1965 and has not yet had the decency to acknowledge the wound. The Methodists split over homosexuality like a nineteenth-century frontier congregation and lost a third of their membership in the divorce. The Presbyterians count their remaining faithful in numbers that would embarrass a moderately successful restaurant chain. The Episcopalians hold magnificent real estate and virtually no one under 60.

The evangelicals, who spent 30 years telling us they had the answer to mainline decline, are now declining faster. The Southern Baptist Convention has shed millions of members, endured a sexual abuse scandal of institutional dimensions and responded with the customary combination of task forces and denial. The megachurch, that peculiarly American invention — the church as arena, the pastor as performer — has produced a reliable conveyor belt of spectacular personal failures. The audience keeps getting smaller.

The Catholics, as noted elsewhere on this page, are playing a different game entirely. They are not declining. They are consolidating. Closing parishes, merging schools, retiring debt, issuing statements. The machinery runs beautifully. The pews do not fill.

What is happening across all of these traditions simultaneously is not a crisis of faith. It is a crisis of credibility. The people who left did not stop believing in something. They stopped believing in the institution that claimed to house it. There is a considerable difference. The institution never understood this, which is why its response to departure has always been a better program, a newer translation, a more contemporary worship style, a rebrand.

You cannot rebrand your way out of a trust collapse.

The demographic data is not ambiguous. The generational data is not ambiguous. The financial data is not ambiguous. Every major tradition in American organized religion is smaller, older and poorer than it was 20 years ago and the trend lines do not bend.

This is not a prediction. This is a description of something already in progress.

The ref has stopped the fight. The corner has thrown in the towel.

The only people still debating the outcome are the ones inside the ring.