, 24 October 2007 (UTC) 
 :I've thought about doing this before: it would involve lots of graphs and charts. The Episcopal Church's fourth bishop was so convinced that the TEC would go extinct by 1820 that he gave up and retired. The real precipitous decline was in the 1780s and another decline in the 1920s. The problem with all these church numbers is the 'anchoring problem'. The TEC hit a Mt Everest peak in the 1950s and all the discussion since then has been anchored to those numbers. And it isn't just the TEC, all the mainline Protestant churches showed a huge spike in the 1950s compared to the 1920s. Essentially, the US experienced two Great Awakenings a century apart and everything has not glistened like those golden eras since. Cheers!  20:53