The New Protestant Coherence?: A Response to Sullins*

This is the startling conclusion reached by D. Paul Sullins (1993) in an article based in part on a reexamination of a portion of our book, American Mainline Religion. Sullins argues that this unity and coherence comes not from a new theological consensus or from social sources or from a new burst of ecumenical energy but from the "constant distance effect" (414). Protestants, it seems, of whatever ideological or denominational stripe, have this in common: the tendency to stay close to the center or close to home, if they change religious affiliation. "Staying close to home," Sullins argues, "is a characteristic of Protestantism as a whole, or, we might say, Protestantism qua Protestantism" (416). We were happy to cooperate with Sullins as his project evolved and are happy now to comment on the results of his study which, as Sullins suggests, is a serious challenge to our book's thesis. American Mainline Religion, we would note, is not about religious switching. It is about change in American religion in the postwar period. Central to that change is the rise of what we call "religious voluntarism," the discovery of individual choice in religious affiliation in the face of increased pluralism and privatization. In the book we look at the rise of the new religious voluntarism and its impact on what has become known as denominational religion. We do not find a lot of evidence of unity and coherence in Protestantism or elsewhere. We worried about the lack of evidence then, and Sullins's new discovery notwithstanding we still do. We have some specific comments to make on the article and its author's use of our book, but first a comment on Protestant unity and coherence. We made a conscious decision in American Mainline Religion not to include data on all Protestants. This decision was partly a practical one: the book contains nearly 40 tables and figures, some extending over two pages, so any reduction of clutter seemed welcome. More important, the book raises serious questions about the