Shrinking Protestant denominations

Congregants have been abandoning the old line Protestant churches for the last half century, and the reasons are pretty obvious.  The clerical leadership in these mainline denominations has embraced and taken on the mantle of all the political tenants of secular liberalism, to wit: political correctness in all its iterations including acceptance and normalization of the gay and lesbian lifestyle, promoting the concept of "social justice" and the indiscriminate largess of the welfare state to even the economic playing field, and other pathologies associated with cultural and moral relativism, such as: the cult of victimology, feminism, racism, affirmative action, and multiculturalism.  So if you are one who believes in personal lifestyle responsibility as well as a personal relationship with God that includes private charitable good works in lieu of dependency on the state, you are out of step with the clergy at many churches these days.  Since these denominations have all been losing congregants since the 1960's, when the really big cultural and political changes occurred in American society, and Europe's as well, there's a serious disconnect here that appears to be a permanent condition.  Those abandoning these faiths seem to be telling the clergy to keep the pulpit out of politics and out of my church life all the while the clergy is busily adding it to their Sunday message.  Ross Douthat in this NYTimes op-ed takes on this subject in a reasonable piece here.

ADDED: A bit more on the history of the demise of the EC and how it devolved into a politicized advocacy secular institution with our much of any theological grounding:

More seriously, the long slow decline of the Episcopal Church into the bottomless abyss of willful political correctness is a case study in the long march of leftism through any institution that leaves its door open even a tiny crack.  The late Paul Seabury of UC Berkeley (a descendant of Thomas Seabury, the first Episcopal bishop in the U.S. when the Episcopal Church formed by breaking off from the Anglican Church during the American Revolution–and yes, Berkeley once had a conservative–several actually–on its faculty) explained it in his famous 1978 Harper’smagazine article “Trendier than Thou”:

Observers who read or reported about the schism within the Episcopal Church in 1977 believed it had been provoked by a single issue: the ordination of women as priests, narrowly approved in September, 1976, by Episcopalian bishops, priests, and lay delegates meeting in General Convention in Minneapolis. The dispute was perceived as only another skirmish in the struggle of equal rights for women – a skirmish that just happened to break a traditionally conservative church in two. But on the contrary, the schism manifested much deeper, and cumulative, impulses within the church that were stimulated by the political turbulence of the 1960s. The issues resolved into a question that the Berkeley scholar Charles Glock had summarized in the title of his 1967 sociological study of the Episcopal Church: “To Comfort or to Challenge?” Was the mission of the church to act within the world as an agent of change or to withdraw from the world and purge itself of quotidian concerns? At the time, the answer to this question seemed obvious to Episcopal leaders, if not to their flock: the institutional church had indeed abdicated its social and political responsibilities. Its redemption – even its survival – depended upon its emergence into the light of secular day, where, as the Church Militant, it would join other political forces to transform society.