The decline of America’s ethnic churches is a familiar story, one that cuts across every region and every Christian denomination: the German and Danish Lutherans of the Midwest; the Moravians of Pennsylvania and North Carolina; the Dutch Reformed settlements of rural Michigan and Iowa; the Byzantine Ruthenians who built pockets of Constantinopolitan Christianity in the coal towns; and the mosaic of Eastern Orthodox churches, from Greeks and Antiochians to Serbs, Russians, and Ukrainians. Less examined is the cultural impact of the fading of these communities, the state of aesthetic, moral, and cultural impoverishment brought on by their decline.
