Evangelicalism in a World Negative to Christianity

I've been looking for a group or dialogue addressing how Christianity anticipates dealing with its declining numbers. It turns out there is a nonprofit focused on just that. Reading about its take on things leaves me with some doubt it is on the right track. Nevertheless, it is addressing today's reality which few others are. He addresses branches of Protestantism, though surely it applies to some degree to Catholicism as well.

The link traces attitudes toward Christianity. It concludes the larger society viewed Christianity as positive until a time in the 1990's. Then the view was neutral for several years and turned negative 10 to 20 years ago. What is needed, the author says, is a strategy for maintaining the faith in the society which has a majority negative view of it. 

The author finds three types of groups in the Christian community (he calls them evangelicals--I'd rather limit use that term). One is those considered liberal Christians. They have social standing and status in society, high levels of education and higher incomes. They are engaging with secular society and changing their tenets of faith to accommodate societal views. Also in this group he includes branches who have modernized services with rock music and brief sermons. 

A second group of believers are the engagers. They hold conservative views and try to change the views of secular society. These include celebrity personalities like Pat Robertson and Franklin Graham.

The third group is the one cultivated by Donald Trump. It is made up of those who had little social status and thus little to lose by holding to the faith. These have less education, lower incomes and are not engaged with upper levels of income and education. They care little for morality within Christian conventional wisdom and accommodated without hesitation Trump's dalliances outside of marriage.

The link author has little hope for holding the faith together with the first two. He thinks the liberal branch will keep bending to the changing society and age out. He sees the second group, engaging with secular society and trying to change it, as hopeless also. The upper income and educational classes will simply never buy again the tenets of Christianity, even if it gives audience to the faith in selected circumstances such Obama inviting Rick Warren to give a prayer at his inauguration. (Rick Warren is now an outsider to fundamentalism because he has hired female pastors.)

The group that holds promise for Christianity his nonprofit believes is the third group, the one which does not engage with society's upper levels of income and education. He praises the "Benedict Option," the concept of a Benedictine writer a few years ago. It is for Christianity to withdraw and not engage with secular society.  

This view that those who set themselves aside can maintain the faith seems against the statistics I have seen. Church attendance is lower, reading the Bible is declining and rural to urban migration is reducing its size. In fact, at this time there is slight growth in liberal Christianity. 

 If he is right the third group hangs on the longest will be because it has turned the faith, "evangelicalism," into a political party.  Someday history will tell us who is right.