The Main Line

Words to Know

Mainline — the older Protestant churches that were for a long time the center of American religious life: among them the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, the American Baptist Churches and the Disciples of Christ. The name is often traced to the Main Line, the wealthy suburbs that grew up along the Pennsylvania Railroad west of Philadelphia, where many of their grandest congregations stood. Scholars are not certain of this.¹

The Reformation — the break with Rome that began when Martin Luther made public his ninety-five theses in 1517, and the churches that came out of it.

The Social Gospel — a movement in these churches, around 1900, that set out to apply my teaching to wages, housing, child labor and the life of cities. Its best-known voice was the Baptist pastor Walter Rauschenbusch.²

Resolution — a statement adopted by a church’s national assembly on a public question. Your churches have adopted thousands.

Start with the name.

Your churches may have got their nickname from a railroad. The Main Line ran out of Philadelphia through some of the richest suburbs in America, and the stone churches along it, with their endowments and their organs and their old families, became the picture of respectable Protestant faith.¹

For most of American history your churches were not on the edge of the country. They were its center. More presidents have belonged to the Episcopal Church than to any other.³ Your churches built the great universities, ran the hospitals, filled the boards, and opened the sessions of Congress with prayer.

Here is the strange thing. On paper, your churches have often been closer to me than almost anyone. You read my Sermon on the Mount as meant for this life. Your assemblies have spoken for the poor, for refugees, for peace, for people other churches turned away. If I graded statements, many of yours would pass.

But I never asked for statements. I told a story about it. A man had two sons, and asked both to go and work in his vineyard. The first said I will not, and then changed his mind and went. The second said I’m going, sir, but he didn’t go (Matthew 21:28–31). I asked which one did his father’s will. Everyone knew the answer.

I am not going to tell you that the people in your churches are hypocrites. Many of them give quietly and serve without being thanked, and some of them have given their lives. I will come back to them, because they matter. The question is whether the four things your churches were built on, the protest, the establishment, the statement and the welcome, are the ones I set down. Let me take them one at a time.

The First Pillar: The Protest

You were taught that the Reformation set the gospel free. It also handed it to the princes.

Luther was right about a great deal. He was right that forgiveness could not be sold, and right that ordinary people should be able to read my words in their own language.

But watch what happened next. In 1525 the peasants of southern Germany rose up. Their best-known demands, the Twelve Articles from Swabia, cited the gospel again and again: they asked to be freed from serfdom, because I had set all people free, and they asked for the right to fish and hunt and gather wood.⁴ Luther answered them first with an Admonition to Peace, which blamed the princes and also told the peasants they were turning Christian freedom into something of the flesh. Then the revolt turned to killing, and he wrote a second pamphlet. He told the princes, and anyone else who could, to smite, slay and stab the rebels, secretly or openly, as one would kill a mad dog.⁵ The princes did. Tens of thousands of peasants were killed that year.

Thirty years later, the Peace of Augsburg ended the first round of religious war in Germany on a simple rule: each prince, Catholic or Lutheran, would decide the religion of his own land, and his subjects would follow it or leave.⁶ The protest against one kind of lord had ended by giving the church to another.

The reformers also turned on the reformers who went further. In Zurich, in 1527, Felix Manz was drowned in the river for rebaptizing adults.⁷ In Calvin’s Geneva, in 1553, Michael Servetus was burned for denying the Trinity.⁸

I said it once, to Peter, with a sword in his hand: Put your sword back into its place, for all those who take the sword will die by the sword (Matthew 26:52). The Reformation kept the sword.

The Second Pillar: The Establishment

You were taught that your church was the conscience of the nation. For a long time it was the nation’s chaplain.

When a church is at the center of a country, it is tempted to bless whatever the center is doing.

Your churches split over slavery, and the line ran through them like a crack. The Methodists divided in 1844, when their General Conference asked a bishop who held slaves to step aside from his office, and the southern delegates refused to accept it. The Presbyterians divided along the same line in 1861.⁹ The Episcopal Church split too, in 1861, and came back together in 1865. One of its bishops, Leonidas Polk, who held hundreds of people in slavery, became a general in the Confederate army.¹⁰

I opened my preaching with release to the captives (Luke 4:18). There is no reading of that which allows a bishop to own people.

And the establishment kept its money. One parish on Wall Street, chartered in 1697 and given 215 acres of land by Queen Anne in 1705, still holds Manhattan real estate worth billions of dollars, though it also gives away tens of millions a year.¹¹ I told a story about a rich man whose fields did so well that he planned bigger barns, and God said to him, You foolish one, tonight your soul is required of you (Luke 12:20). And I said: Sell that which you have, and give gifts to the needy (Luke 12:33).

The Third Pillar: The Statement

You were taught that speaking out is the church’s witness. I asked whether you went into the vineyard.

Your national assemblies have adopted statements on almost every question of the last hundred years: war, poverty, race, immigration, the climate, the Middle East. Many of them say things I would say.

But a statement usually costs the people who vote for it much less than the thing it describes. It is usually read by the people who already agree with it. And it can take the place of the thing it describes, like a man who writes a beautiful letter of sympathy and never visits.

My brother James saw this in the first generation: if a brother or sister is naked and in lack of daily food, and one of you tells them, “Go in peace. Be warmed and filled;” yet you didn’t give them the things the body needs, what good is it? (James 2:15–16).

I asked a whole crowd the same question: Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and don’t do the things which I say? (Luke 6:46). A resolution is a way of saying Lord, Lord in very good prose.

The Fourth Pillar: The Welcome

You were taught that all are welcome. I told you who to invite.

This is the pillar on which your churches stand closest to me, and I want to say so plainly. Many of your churches opened their pulpits to women long before others. In 1956 the Methodists gave women full rights as clergy, and in 1974 eleven women were ordained priests in Philadelphia before their own church allowed it.¹² Many of your churches welcomed people that other churches drove out. I ate with the people the religious world had written off (Mark 2:15–17), and when you do that, you are doing what I did.

But look around the room on a Sunday. Surveys have found that members of several of your churches, the Episcopal Church most of all, are among the most educated and the best-off people in the country.¹³ All are welcome is printed on the sign. The people who come are mostly people like the people who are already there.

I gave a rule for that, at a dinner party: When you make a dinner or a supper, don’t call your friends, nor your brothers, nor your kinsmen, nor rich neighbors, or perhaps they might also return the favor, and pay you back. But when you make a feast, ask the poor, the maimed, the lame, or the blind (Luke 14:12–13).

A welcome that waits at the door for the right people to walk in is not my welcome. Mine went out into the streets and lanes (Luke 14:21).

What Your Church Kept

Now, in fairness, look at what your church kept.

John Wesley, the founder of the Methodists, told his people to earn all they could, save all they could, and give all they could, and he meant the last part most.¹⁴ He preached in the open fields to miners, visited the prisons, and in 1774 wrote against the slave trade.¹⁵

Your Social Gospel preachers took my words about the poor as instructions for this life, not only the next one, when many churches around them did not.

In 1965, an Episcopal seminary student named Jonathan Daniels went to Alabama to help Black citizens register to vote. When a man raised a shotgun at a seventeen-year-old Black girl, Ruby Sales, Daniels pushed her out of the way and took the blast himself. He died there.¹⁶ Greater love has no one than this (John 15:13).

In the 1980s, churches in Tucson and across the country, many of them from your traditions, took in refugees fleeing the wars in Central America, and some of their members went to court for it.¹⁷ I was a stranger, and you took me in (Matthew 25:35).

And one of your own, a Lutheran pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, saw the danger in your tradition more clearly than anyone, and paid for it. I will let him answer one of the replies below.

So the question is not whether I am in your church. I am in Jonathan Daniels and Ruby Sales, and in the church basement in Tucson. The question is which part stands on top. In many of your churches, on top, is comfort: the right positions, held by comfortable people, in beautiful buildings, at no cost.

What You’ll Hear Back

If you show this to someone you love, they will have answers ready. Here are the six you will hear most, and what is underneath each one.

“At least we’re not like the fundamentalists.”

I told a story about a man who prayed like that. He stood in the Temple and said, God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of men … or even like this tax collector (Luke 18:11). The tax collector could only beat his breast and ask for mercy, and he was the one who went home right with God (Luke 18:13–14).

Being better than someone else was never my measure. The measure is the vineyard.

“We are saved by grace alone.”

Your own Bonhoeffer answered this one in 1937, four years after Hitler came to power, writing about churches that had made their peace with comfort. He called it cheap grace: forgiveness preached without repentance, grace that asks for nothing, grace without following me. He said cheap grace was the deadly enemy of the church.¹⁸ He was hanged by the Nazis in April 1945, a few weeks before the war in Europe ended.¹⁹ He had followed.

Grace is real. I forgave freely. But the people I forgave got up and walked, and Zacchaeus stood up and promised half of everything he owned to the poor (Luke 19:8).

“We don’t take the Bible literally.”

You are right not to read every page as a newspaper. But notice which parts get the softest reading. Nobody in your church struggles to take love your neighbor literally. The parts that become metaphors are the expensive ones: Sell that which you have, and give gifts to the needy (Luke 12:33), and woe to you who are rich! (Luke 6:24).

When the rich man asked me what to do, he understood me perfectly. That is why he went away sorrowful, for he was one who had great possessions (Mark 10:22). He did not think I was speaking in pictures.

“Our denomination has a statement on that.”

Then you have said I’m going, sir. Go into the vineyard (Matthew 21:30–31).

“Our churches are shrinking. We need to be more relevant.”

Your churches have lost members for sixty years, and many of your buildings are emptier than the people who built them could have imagined.²⁰ I understand the fear.

But I never measured by numbers. I left ninety-nine sheep to find one (Luke 15:4). I said that where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the middle of them (Matthew 18:20). And I said: unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains by itself alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit (John 12:24).

A church that shrinks while doing what I said is a seed. A church that keeps its endowment and its building and stops doing it is a museum, however full the pews.

“Jesus wouldn’t want us to make anyone uncomfortable.”

I made a great many people uncomfortable. I told the rich they had already had their comfort (Luke 6:24). I turned over the tables in the Temple (Mark 11:15). I said: Do you think that I have come to give peace in the earth? I tell you, no, but rather division (Luke 12:51).

Being nice is not the same as being kind. Kindness sometimes has to say the thing nobody at the coffee hour wants to hear.

If You Were Raised in It

You may remember the hymns, the robed choir, the coffee hour, the confirmation class, the potluck, the church that felt more like a family than a cause. You may remember a pastor who never once told you that you were going to hell, and who marched, or wrote to Congress, or sat with your grandmother when she died. You were given a gentler faith than many, and you should be grateful for that.

Nothing here asks you to trade it for a harsher one.

It only asks you to do what I asked of the lawyer: How do you read it? (Luke 10:26). Read my words without the softening, the way the rich man heard them. Then look at who is not in the pews, and go and invite them. Not to the service. To dinner.

Check It Yourself

Read Matthew 21:28–32. Write down what each son said and what each son did.

Read Luke 14:12–24. Make a list of who is invited at the end of the story.

Read Luke 18:9–14. Write down what the Pharisee was grateful for.

Read Mark 10:17–27. Write down whether the rich man thought I was speaking in a metaphor.

Read James 2:14–17.

Find the most recent national resolution your denomination adopted on poverty or refugees. Then find out what your own congregation did about it last year.

Look up the Twelve Articles of the German peasants (1525) and Luther’s reply (both are free online). Count how many times the peasants cite the gospel.

The Short Version

• Mainline may come from the Main Line, the rich railroad suburbs of Philadelphia. Your churches were the American establishment.
• On paper, your churches have often been close to me. I told a story about a son who said I’m going, sir and didn’t go.
• The Reformation freed my words from sale. Then Luther told the princes to smite, slay and stab the rebel peasants (1525), and the Peace of Augsburg let each prince choose his people’s religion (1555).
• Your churches split over slavery, and an Episcopal bishop who held people in slavery became a Confederate general. I came to proclaim release to the captives.
• A resolution is a way of saying Lord, Lord in good prose. My brother James asked what good Be warmed and filled does.
• All are welcome is your best pillar. But I told you to invite the poor, the maimed, the lame and the blind to dinner, not to wait for them at the door.
• You kept Wesley, the Social Gospel, Jonathan Daniels, the sanctuary churches and Bonhoeffer.
• Bonhoeffer called grace that asks for nothing cheap grace, and he was hanged for following.
• The parts of the Bible that become metaphors are the expensive ones.
• Shrinking is not failure. A seed has to fall into the ground.