The problems of mainline Protestantism in our time — the collapse of what used to be called “the Protestant Establishment” — can make for depressing reading, so it helps that prominent journalist William Murchison has a sprightly prose style. In his new book, Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline Christianity (Encounter, 215 pp., $25.95), Murchison tells the story of how, in seeking to adapt to the times, the Episcopal Church has rendered itself less relevant to the actual spiritual struggles of the men and women in its pews. In today’s Episcopalianism, he writes, “there is a seemingly unstoppable momentum to ratify the culture’s choices — the whole range of them, centered on the plenary power of humans to ordain and dispense and control and rearrange.”

In the abstract, this may leave open the possibility of an ecclesiastical endorsement of a libertarian utopia — but in practice it robs the culture of an important witness to the deeper truth about man: that he is broken and fallible, and in need of God’s grace as much as of political liberty. There is more than enough political activism in our society; with his characteristic eloquence, Murchison makes the case that the Episcopal and other mainline churches would do America a great service by returning their attention to the distinctives of the Christian faith.