I'm starting a new threat on this rather than posting in the thread this quote originates in as its very off topic and deserves its own discussion. But formally, this is actually wrong in its diagnosis of what has caused the fall of Mainline Protestant Churches in the United States. Ordination of Women Pastors and leaders is downstream of what actually destroyed them, and, as typical for Catholics, the other bugbear they point to, "Sola Scriptura" is ALSO not where the problem stems from, and in fact, much of the problems stem from the REJECTION of Sola Scriptura within Mainline Protestants.Of course the Anglicans and a lot of mainline Protestant Denominations fell to this heresy and thus they fundamentally began imploding as these cultural institutions became hijacked. And with their dogma eroded, their moral foundation collapsed as its no longer anchored to the solid foundation built by Christ (I as a Catholic have to give a shout out to St. Peter the first Pope), but rather a house built of sand.
You see, most people focus on the collapse of the Mainline Churches post-1950, but the massive shedding of members from those Churches and the subsequent rise of the Evangelical movement was not a sudden weird thing, but rather it was a collapse decades in the making that traces back to the late 19th and early 20th century. It is tied to the rise of Materialism in Academia, Darwinism, Eugenics, and the Fundamentalist/Modernist Controversy in the 1920s.
The rise of pure Materialism in the Academy in the 19th century is one of the major root causes of the collapse. One thing people forget is that almost ALL the elite Universities in the United States were originally founded as RELIGIOUS SEMINARIES. There are a few exceptions, mostly older State sponsored institutions, but the majority of the Ivy League Schools were founded to educate and produce pastors. These universities were quite prestigious even in the 19th century, and so set the tone for the elites even then. With the rise of Materialism as the dominate form of acceptable academic thought and an attitude of being unbeholden to the knowledge and wisdom of the past rising in academia, there began systemic efforts to seek Materialist solutions to Spiritual stories and history. The very new field of archeology began making very strong statements regarding the historicity of many myths and legends (IE "Troy did not exist", "There was no Jericho", etc.) that people took as being true that later turned out to be utterly false. Further, in this period the standard became that texts like the Bible were ASSUMED to be historically inaccurate unless proven otherwise by a secondary source, which led to things like the idea of Jesus Christ being an ahistorical figure (something no serious historian takes now). As all these materialist theories rose, including things like Darwinism, Social Darwinism, etc. the academy became more and more hostile to what you might call "traditional" religious beliefs, with it being broadly accepted among elite academics that the Bible was just another mythical work and that its only value was in that it had "good moral lessons" to model society on.
All this came to a head in the 1920s where the Modernists, who basically rejected Scripture as authoritative and inspired, but rather saw it as mythical and useful stories, via political maneuvering, social stigmatizing, and academic sabotage drove scholars who held to traditional Christian beliefs regarding the Bible out of Academia, including, most importantly, out of the Divinity schools of these elite institutions. Something to note is if you look around the US you will find a plethora of smaller explicitly religious colleges that were founded between 1900 and the 1930s... institutions that were founded by the Fundamentalists who were driven out of the elite institutions.
Also: please note, the issues the Modernists used to drive the Fundamentalists out of the University system were not moralistic nor were they "these people believe in God", they used topics like the historicity of Christ and pointed to the elite consensus that Christ was mythological, a position that none of those elite universities hold to today, in short, from an actual MATERIALIST standard, it was the Modernists who were often wrong in their positions and the Fundamentalists correct; however, the point of driving those people out wasn't about those topics, it was about the moral authority of scripture.
But with the fall of the elite institutions, it was only a matter of time. The Mainline Protestant Churches were emmeshed in American culture as heavily as any other, and so saw pastors and "theologians" who graduated from or held position in prestigious universities as more authoritative than those from small "Fundamentalist" institutions (also note how "Fundamentalist" was a NEUTRAL term in the 1920s now has a negative connotation...). Thus leadership of the Mainline Protestant Churches became populated primarily by people educated and holding to the views of those elite institutions, that is, Materialist and anti-Spiritual and the Bible as non-authoritative. Surveys in the 1950s showed that graduates of these universities who were pastors often did not even believe in the existence of God. Yes, PASTORS not believing in God.
Of course, it takes time for rot to spread through, the 1930s and 40s still had most Mainline Churches being orthodox as critical mass of materialist leadership to be able to begin making changes to how the Mainline Churches operated had not been reached, and this critical mass did not come until about around the 1950s and 60s, which is when you begin to see the Mainlines begin to adopt things like the ordination of women. This is also when you began to see the Mainline Churches begin adopting "softer" Christianity that was more in line with what culture and society wanted. By the 1970s it became apparent the Mainline Churches were completely subverted by the World, and many Christians began seeking out other options. The Fundamentalists, who had been scattered and thrown to the winds around the US had laid a groundwork of non-mainline Churches and institutions that suddenly began to grow in the 1970s as dissatisfied Protestant Christians sought out Biblically sound teaching, and thus began the rise of the Evangelical Movement in the United States.