Looking back on protestantism, the thing that strikes me most is its collective nothingness. There are admirable individual believers and small groups, but in the absence of a principle of concrete authority larger groups become utterly mindless. There’s really nothing there. For evidence, consider the newsclips from the mainline protestant denominations at The Institute on Religion and Democracy. Why would anybody be tempted to bother with institutional protestantism? What’s the point of “dialoguing” with such zeroes?