The traditions of the old establishment: seminaries that teach evolution and criticism together, national bodies that answer new technologies with study documents, and a long record of funding the conversation itself.
The mainline Protestant churches — Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Methodist, and their ecumenical bodies — were the institutional home of much early modern science and remain the traditions most at ease with the historical-critical and scientific mainstreams. Their seminaries teach evolution and biblical criticism side by side; their national bodies issue study documents rather than bans (the ELCA’s social statement on genetics, the United Methodist resolutions on science and technology, the Church of England’s investments-and-ethics science briefings).
The characteristic mainline failure mode, by its own internal critics’ account, is not resistance but evaporation: positions so carefully qualified that they bind no one. Its characteristic strength is infrastructure for dialogue — it built many of the institutes, journals, and endowed chairs (and much of the Templeton-era programming) through which the science-and-religion conversation happens.
Recorded Stances in the Register
Anesthesia in childbirth and surgery Embraced
Simpson’s rebuttal — from Genesis 2:21, the deep sleep God caused before removing the rib — persuaded the Protestant mainstream, which adopted anesthesia as a mercy consistent with dominion over pain; the sorrows of the curse describe the world’s fallenness, they do not command its preservation.
Contraception Embraced
Lambeth 1930 made the Anglican Communion the first major body to permit contraception within marriage, and the mainline churches followed to near-universal acceptance under stewardship of the family; remaining argument concerns methods that may act after fertilization, where positions migrate toward the embryo question.
Evolution by natural selection Embraced
Mainline seminaries and study documents receive evolution as the established account of life’s history and re-read doctrines of creation and providence accordingly; the debate inside these churches is about the theology, not the biology.
Heliocentric astronomy Embraced
Kepler held the heliocentric system as a Lutheran and argued it theologically: the sun as image of God the Father in a cosmos built on geometrical harmonies. No Lutheran body condemned the system; its difficulties in Protestant lands were academic before they were doctrinal.
Nuclear weapons Condemned
Mainline bodies (the US Catholic bishops’ 1983 pastoral is Catholic; the Methodist, Presbyterian, and Lutheran statements are parallel) largely condemned first use and pressed abolition through the Cold War, and the mainline peace churches remain abolitionist.
Surgical and medical abortion Regulated
Mainline bodies generally treat abortion as a grave moral decision that law should nonetheless leave, under regulation, to the woman and her conscience — the position of the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Episcopal statements in various forms — and the tradition’s internal pro-life minorities dissent in print.
The printing press Embraced
Print was the Reformation’s delivery system: vernacular Bibles, catechisms, and pamphlets made the priesthood of all believers a media fact. Protestant authorities then built their own censorships — the embrace was of the press, not of press freedom.
References
- Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Genetics, Faith and Responsibility (2011)
- Ian G. Barbour, Religion and Science (1997)