Fear of death

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Watched a video on the "extinction" of the US Episcopal church, based on the handling of some prime real estate the church owns in Manhattan.  Numbers are declining, but I rather doubt extinction.  That would assume trend would continue unchanged, but declines like that tend to taper off.

Anyway, all mainline churches in all Christendom are declining.  So are the more fundamentalist ones and the Catholics.  With moderate Christianity, I get it, if you no longer believe and teach, why do you exist?
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Your skepticism about "extinction" is well-placed statistically. The straight-line extrapolation fallacy — assuming a current trend continues unchanged indefinitely — is exactly what's at work in those dire predictions. One seminary president presented to the Episcopal Executive Council in 2020 that at the current rate of decline, the denomination would have no Sunday attendance in 30 years and no baptized members in 47 years — but that kind of projection ignores the classic S-curve behavior of institutional decline, where rates slow as the pool of leavers shrinks and a committed core stabilizes.
Religion in Public

The numbers are genuinely bad, though. Membership went from roughly 1.96 million in 2010 to approximately 1.547 million in 2023, and attendance dropped from around 600,000 a decade ago to 413,000 in 2024. But there are already signs of the tapering you'd expect: attendance actually rose 10.69 percent in 2023 from post-COVID lows, and giving rose as well, though inflation undercut it. Denominations rarely go linearly to zero; they find a floor of genuinely committed members.
Christian Post
Juicy Ecumenism

The more interesting question is your point about moderate Christianity's reason for being. There's a coherent sociological argument that mainline Protestantism hollowed itself out by becoming, in effect, progressive civic culture with liturgy attached. When the theological content becomes negotiable and the ethical conclusions are indistinguishable from secular liberalism, the obvious question is why bother with the institutional overhead. The Episcopal Church's progressive moves — gay bishops, same-sex marriage — were probably right on the merits, but they drove out a significant bloc of theologically conservative congregations and created years of expensive property litigation.
Christian Post

Meanwhile, the Episcopal Church's own interim executive officer reported in 2025 that the decline is primarily due to falling birth rates — Episcopalians simply had fewer children than they did in the mid-20th century, with 880,000 children in Sunday School programs in 1965, declining to 297,000 by 2001. That's the demographic time-bomb you've noted with other declining religious groups: if the transmission mechanism through families breaks down, the institution starves regardless of doctrine.
Wikipedia

There's also something specifically Anglican about the predicament. The Episcopal Church inherited the Church of England's traditional role as an establishment church of the educated professional class — a social function that's become largely obsolete. That class no longer needs a church for respectability or social connection. The fundamentalist churches, whatever their intellectual deficits, at least offer genuine community, intense belonging, and a clearly differentiated worldview. That's harder to replicate when your theology quietly agrees with the secular consensus on almost everything.

Well attitudes about sexuality and women's role and so on are one thing, attitudes about God and afterlife and the really religious things are another.

That's a sharper distinction than most commentators make, and I think you're right that it's the more important one.

The sexuality and gender issues get most of the attention because they're culturally legible — they map onto familiar political fault lines. But they're essentially boundary disputes about who's in and who's out, and which century's social norms the church endorses. They're not really theological in the deep sense.

The harder, quieter problem for mainline Protestantism is that many of its clergy and educated laity long ago made their peace with not literally believing the core claims — bodily resurrection, personal God who intervenes in history, prayer as actual communication rather than self-regulation, afterlife as something more than metaphor. That accommodation was intellectually honest, arguably, given what educated people knew by the mid-20th century. But it created a structural absurdity: institutions whose entire raison d'être is a set of truth claims, operated by people who regard those claims as symbolic at best.

You can sustain that for a generation or two on cultural inertia, aesthetic attachment to liturgy, and the genuine social goods the institution provides — community, rites of passage, ethical formation. But eventually the question you raised gets asked: if the resurrection is a metaphor and God is a symbol for human aspiration, why maintain all this infrastructure? The secular world offers community, ethics, and meaning without the overhead or the intellectual discomfort.

The fundamentalists have a ready answer: because it's true, literally, and salvation depends on it. That's intellectually untenable to many people, but it's at least internally coherent as a reason for the institution to exist.

What mainline Protestantism never quite found was a third position — one that took the metaphysical questions seriously without demanding pre-Enlightenment credulity. Tillich tried. Bonhoeffer gestured at it before he was hanged. But it never became a mass theology. So the moderate churches ended up neither fish nor fowl — too demythologized to satisfy people who want genuine religion, too churchy to satisfy people who just want ethical community.

The world is going secular.   Fundamentalists succeed short term in limited areas, but overall general religiosity is declining.  My personal experience is my spouse's sister's daughter, who is an ordained Presbyterian minister in a largely transsexual congregation.  They still teach God and Jesus and resurrection and heaven and the trinity and what have you.

That's a genuinely interesting data point — and it cuts against the usual narrative on both sides.

The standard conservative framing is that theological progressivism and cultural accommodation cause decline. But what your niece-in-law's congregation suggests is that the causation may run the other way: a community with strong identity and genuine belonging can sustain traditional theological content even with a radically non-traditional demographic. The trans community has, if anything, acute reasons to want transcendence, dignity grounded in something beyond social consensus, and a community that insists on their full humanity. Orthodox theology actually serves those needs reasonably well — better perhaps than a vague therapeutic spirituality would.

It also illustrates that the sexuality controversies were somewhat beside the point theologically. A congregation that is entirely organized around gender nonconformity is nonetheless teaching resurrection and Trinity. The doctrinal core survived the social revolution intact. Which rather supports your distinction — those are separable questions.

On the broader secularization trend, the data are fairly unambiguous in the developed world. Western Europe is essentially post-Christian in any practicing sense. The US has been the outlier among wealthy democracies, but that exceptionalism is eroding fairly rapidly, especially among younger cohorts. The "nones" — people claiming no religious affiliation — are now the largest single religious category in the US by some measures.

The interesting open question is whether secularization is the terminus or just a phase. Some serious sociologists of religion argue that human beings have persistent needs — for meaning, ritual, community around ultimate questions — that purely secular institutions satisfy poorly. Whether those needs eventually generate new religious forms, or get met in ways we don't yet recognize as religious, is genuinely unclear.

I don't think we have anything like that, certainly not a "need." Religions self-perpetuate via childhood indoctrination, and even though details can change the mentality generally holds.  The desire to have an afterlife is huge.

That's a more parsimonious explanation and probably closer to the truth. The "humans have an innate religious need" argument has always smelled a bit like retrofitting — observing that religion is universal and concluding there must be a built-in demand for it, when transmission and wish-fulfillment account for the data just as well.

Your two mechanisms are doing most of the work. Childhood indoctrination establishes the mentality — the habit of faith, the comfort with non-empirical claims, the emotional framework — and that persists even when specific doctrines drift considerably. You've noted before that parental modeling is the decisive variable for religious transmission, which is consistent with this: it's not Sunday school curriculum that does it, it's the ambient fact of watching parents treat religion as real and important.

The afterlife piece is probably the more powerful driver of adult retention, and it intensifies with age in an obvious way. Mortality salience is a well-documented psychological force. Secular frameworks offer acceptance of death, or meaning-despite-finitude, but those are essentially stoic positions requiring genuine philosophical work to maintain. The promise of personal continuity — that the specific self, with its memories and relationships, persists — is enormously more emotionally attractive and requires no such work. It just requires belief.

What's interesting is that the afterlife desire seems to survive considerable doctrinal erosion. People who've largely abandoned orthodox Christianity often retain some private version — vague continuity, reunion with the dead, something rather than nothing. The theology goes but the wish stays. Which suggests the wish is doing the structural work, and doctrine is more or less the vessel it travels in.

We are wired to stay alive.  That is biological and easily understood in natural selection terms, except the wiring holds on long after children are born and grow up, so there is more.  There is just the fact of existence and its pleasures and experiences.

Yes, and that's a cleaner account than invoking any special "religious instinct." The survival drive is unquestionable as biology — it's the core imperative natural selection installs in anything that reproduces. The puzzle you're pointing at is why it doesn't simply attenuate once the reproductive and parenting work is done, since from a strict gene-propagation standpoint the old organism is then largely redundant.

The pace-of-life and antagonistic pleiotropy frameworks you've engaged with before address part of this — senescence is a side effect of selection pressure concentrated on early reproduction, not a designed endpoint. But the psychological persistence of the survival drive past biological usefulness is its own phenomenon. The wiring simply doesn't have an off switch calibrated to reproductive completion.

And your second point is I think the more honest and interesting one. Beyond the biological drive, there's just the brute fact that conscious experience, when not acutely painful, tends to generate its own attachment. Existence acquires positive valence — pleasure, curiosity, aesthetic experience, relationship, the next thing you haven't yet seen or thought. That's not reducible to survival wiring in any simple way. It's something like: once you have a rich enough inner life, it becomes valuable to itself.

Which makes the afterlife desire comprehensible without requiring any special religious psychology. You don't need a "God-shaped hole" or innate transcendence-seeking. You just need a conscious being who finds existence worthwhile and faces its termination. The wish that it continue is almost logically entailed.

The remarkable thing, perhaps, is that some people genuinely make peace with finitude. That may require either unusual temperament or real philosophical achievement — or both.

I don't know that one actually makes peace with it; one just knows it.

That's a precise and honest distinction. "Making peace" implies an emotional resolution, some achieved equanimity, which may be largely performative or self-deceiving — the philosopher's studied acceptance that looks serene from the outside but may be doing considerable psychological work underneath.

Knowing it is different. It's cognitive acknowledgment without any claim about the emotional register that accompanies it. You know you will die the way you know other unalterable facts. That knowledge coexists with the survival drive and the attachment to experience without necessarily resolving the tension between them. The tension may just be a permanent feature of being a conscious mortal.

It also sidesteps the suspiciously convenient narrative that wisdom brings acceptance, that the mature person arrives at some tranquil relationship with their own extinction. That narrative is very old and may serve the people who promulgate it more than it describes reality. Montaigne, Epicurus, the Stoics — they worked very hard to construct frameworks for not fearing death, which rather suggests the fear required a lot of construction work to manage.

Simply knowing, without pretending to peace, is arguably more intellectually honest. The fact remains disagreeable. You don't have to pretend otherwise.

And at your point in life, with the kind of mind you have, the more absorbing reality is probably just what's in front of you — the compound, the blog, whatever question is currently interesting. Which is perhaps the most functional relationship with mortality available: not resolution, just continued engagement with the present.

Yea one would like to avoid thinking about it, but that is hard to do.

Yes, and the avoidance is itself evidence that knowing isn't the same as peace. If you'd genuinely resolved it emotionally, there'd be nothing to avoid.

The intrusion is probably unavoidable at a certain age and with a certain kind of mind. A less reflective person may manage better simply by not following the thought when it arises. But the habit of honest examination that serves you well across every other domain doesn't conveniently suspend itself for the one topic where you'd prefer it to. The same mental machinery that you'd apply to a flawed actuarial model or a dubious medical study turns toward the fact of your own finitude and just keeps running.

And the body collaborates unhelpfully. Physical reminders accumulate — the grab bars, the careful navigation, the awareness of what requires more management than it once did. Each one is a small data point that's hard to misread.

The honest position may simply be that this is one of the genuinely bad things about being human with a functioning mind, and there's no satisfying resolution available, only the ordinary compensations of a day that has interesting things in it. Which, from what I can tell, your days generally do.
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