As a young boy in Canada in the 1970s I often accompanied my grandmother to her neighborhood United Church for Sunday service. The United Church is a Canadian invention. In the 1920s some of the largest and oldest Protestant churches in the country, including all the Methodists and the Congregationalists, got together to form a single denomination.

Back then my grandma’s church was packed with young and old alike. It wasn’t unique. The other Mainline Protestant houses of worship in her town—the local Anglican (Episcopalian), Lutheran, and Presbyterian churches—were all filled.