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One reason they dont is that some of what those congregations offer is already embodied in liberal politics and culture. As the sociologist N. J. Demerath argued in the 1990s, liberal churches have suffered institutional decline, but also enjoy a sort of cultural triumph, losing members even as their most distinctive commitments ecumenical spirituality and a progressive social Gospel permeate academia, the media, pop culture, the Democratic Party.

But this equilibrium may not last, and it may not deserve to. The campus experience of late suggests that liberal Protestantism without the Protestantism tends to gradually shed the liberalism as well, transforming into an illiberal cult of victimologies that burns heretics with vigor. The wider experience of American politics suggests that as liberalism de-churches it struggles to find a nontransactional organizing principle, a persuasive language of the common good. And the experience of American society suggests that religious impulses without institutions arent enough to bind communities and families, to hold atomization and despair at bay. . . .

Do it for your friends and neighbors, town and cities: Thriving congregations have spillover effects that even anti-Trump marches cant match.

Do it for your family: Church is good for health and happiness, its a better place to meet a mate than Tinder, and even its most modernized form is still an ark of memory, a link between the living and the dead.

I understand that theres the minor problem of actual belief. But honestly, dear liberals, many of you do believe in the kind of open Gospel that a lot of mainline churches preach.

If pressed, most of you arent hard-core atheists: You pursue religious experiences, you have affinities for Unitarianism or Quakerism, you can even appreciate Christian orthodoxy when its woven into Marilynne Robinson novels or the Letter From Birmingham Jail.

You say youre spiritual but not religious because you associate religion with hierarchies and dogmas and strict rules about sex. But the Protestant mainline has gone well out of its way to accommodate you on all these points.

I appreciate that by staying away from church youre vindicating my Catholic skepticism of that accommodation but really, arent you being a little ungrateful, a little slothful, a little selfish by leaving these churches empty when theyre trying to be exactly the change you say you wish Christianity would make?

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Shouldn't liberals be going to liberal churches? - Patheos (blog)