Claim. Hendricks synthesizes a 12-feature comparison distinguishing liberal-mainline from evangelical American Christianity — drilling deeper than the Hadaway empirical comparison to characterize why the two types diverge structurally.
Elaboration. Per table-2-typical-differences-between-liberal-and-evangelical-churches. The 12 axes:
| Liberal Mainline | Evangelical | |
|---|---|---|
| Leadership | Seminary graduates | Local-church/Bible-school educated |
| Location | Always a church building | Often alternative spaces (storefronts, theatres, etc.) |
| Membership | Mandatory, infant baptism | Voluntary, believer’s baptism |
| Target market | Birth-members, denominationally committed | People with no church commitment |
| Mission | Social causes, traditional practices | To save people |
| Worship | Formulaic, theologically-generated, liturgical | Innovative, emotion-moving, contemporary |
| Music | Organ, traditional hymns | Electric guitar/bass/drums, praise songs |
| Toward other faiths | Ecumenical (God works through everyone) | Evangelical (God here; we’re called to save you) |
| Spirituality | Spiritual experiences not expected | Open to healing, prophecy, extemporaneous prayer |
| Marriage/family | Affirming personal choice | Strict traditional guidelines |
| Governance | Multi-level national hierarchy | Flat; local empowerment |
| Polity | Parish system | Free church — no parish lines |
For UC: Hendricks’s implicit positioning is that UC structurally fits the evangelical pattern on most features (target market, mission, spirituality, marriage/family strictness, governance flatness) but inconsistently — UC tends to have multi-level hierarchy (liberal-pattern), credentialed-leader bias (liberal-pattern), and a strong para-church / ecumenical orientation (liberal-pattern). The mixed pattern is the diagnostic problem the populist church case addresses.
See also. populist-church, hadaway-19-feature-growing-vs-dying-comparison