U.S. Protestantism—once famous for its diversity—is homogenizing into what is almost a new faith, and if it continues in its present direction, it will be stone-cold dead in a couple of dozen years. This thesis comes from no hot-eyed prophet of doom but from a coolly analytical professor of Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School named Gibson Winter; and he supports it in a well-documented book titled The Suburban Captivity of the Churches (Doubleday; $3.50).
America's new form of Christianity is what Episcopalian Winter calls the "organization church"—the church that is centered...