Right. If a church really doesn’t believe in anything, what’s the point of giving up your Sunday morning for nothing. Why give your money to not much of anything. The only people who remain are there out of inertia, tradition.
Exactly. If the church doesn’t believe in anything absolutely, then it’s just a social club with vaguely spiritual language.
The progressive movement fundamentally changed the church a little more than a century ago. On one hand it created the social gospel, which was and still is pushed by baptist and pentecostal type churches. (prohibition is a good example of the social gospel. On the other hand progressive “higher criticism” infected the mainline protestant churches. It began with questioning whether miracles occurred and having concluded that most Biblical miracles are just stories these churches quickly devolved into sexually perverse, progressive wastelands that don’t believe in anything absolutely.