mainline protestant

I am tired of pretending that we want to hang out at the country club and eat cucumber sandwiches in fancy hats. We are not some sort of upper-crust elite society. Now, it's time to discard that tired label that ties us too closely with a particular race and class. It's time to call forth another name.

I'm puzzled by Sally Quinn's take on Hillary Clinton's tweeting debut this week:

There were two surprising things about Hillary Clinton’s first tweet.

Clinton broke her Twitter silence this week with this bio: “Wife, mom, lawyer, women and kids advocate, FLOAR, FLOTUS, US Senator, SecState, author, dog owner, hair icon, pantsuit aficionado, glass ceiling cracker, TBD . . . .” A photo by Diana Walker showing a serious-looking Clinton in black and looking at her Blackberry through dark glasses is her avatar.

For Elesha Coffman, the pre-1960 Century is a window on the gap between an educated elite and a mass population of churchgoers.

Ross Douthat's gotten a lot of pushback for using his soapbox to complain that liberal Christianity lacks "a religious reason for its own existence." And with good reason—it'd be nice if the national paper of record's faithiest columnist could at least spin a fresher argument against us mainliners.

My favorite response so far comes from the always entertaining Sarah Morice-Brubaker.

Jill Gill has produced a remarkable account of the declining influence of mainline Protestantism and the NCC in the 1960s and 70s.

Diana Butler Bass's new book is warm and winsome. But it lacks the particularizing power of her earlier work's grounding in stories about specific communities and people.