I go to a mainline church, a little church in Orlando that is a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Every Sunday we confess we believe:
1) in the deity of Jesus Christ
2) in the virgin birth of Christ
3) in the resurrection of Jesus Christ
4) in his return in glory to judge the living and the dead
... things conservative evangelicals usually consider "fundamental" traditionally.
That doesn't sound so "apostate" to me, does it? Many conservative churches, on the other hand, do not have a significant confession of faith that is said publically, and they may have minimal guidelines or rules on just what exactly they do believe or confess.
There's so many wrong assumptions about mainline churches in that article. The biggest mistake being that numerical decline is a sign of the mainline approach being wrong or false. Faithfulness has never been measured this way. Frankly, the focus on church growth and numbers displayed indicates the consumerist ethos of much of American religion and is not indicative of historic Christianity, the "faith once delivered to the saints".
Another is that mainline theology and practice is the result of cultural capitulation . This is again false. Mainline churches have been committed to their current ways of being for a long time, literally centuries. Recent moves in controversial areas such as human sexuality are the result of trends that have been happening for a long time: decades, not years.
Mainline churches engage in actual theology, not biblical demagoguery. Not understanding this difference is crucial. Fundamentalist churches rely on authoritarianism and limited accountability for a leader to tell their followers what to believe, how to believe, with limited debate or discussion possible. While lip-service is given to the Bible, critically reading the text is not favored. Mainline churches, on the other hand, usually have accountability to a wider world through synodical polity, sometimes on multiple levels, and significant lay participation in that process. Theology is done critically, by reading the Bible and Church traditions as the fundamental sources of doctrine, in light of current circumstances and scholarship and with accountability to the Great Commission and the Gospel.
Conservative churches in the US are also declining. The only exceptions are Pentecostals and the Eastern Orthodox Church. Eastern Orthodox do not traditionally fit easily into the conservative American religious landscape socially or politically, as Orthodoxy has a stronger commitment to social justice and doesn't fit with the privatized, pietistic ethos of conservative American religion. They have tended to flock politically with mainline Protestants.
This decline of religion in general in the US is also nothing new, and it's following the patterns that have already been happening for a century in Europe. So this is not a reason for conservative Christians to be triumphalist. Conservatives have just managed to gain a stronger voice poltiically in the US, but it is very likely a pyrrhic victory.
