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North American Christianity, like so much of U.S. culture, is caught up in a competitive marketplace. Seminaries supply many of the leaders and entrepreneurs in the religious marketplace, along with the competing theologies that are their stock in trade. Such seminary competition leads to the congregational, denominational, and theological "market share" of tomorrow.

In the past generation, evangelicalism has grown at the expense of the old mainline. But how did this theological competition play out on the ground—and specifically on seminary campuses?

A close look at two competing seminaries in Kentucky—the mainline Lexington Theological Seminary and the evangelical Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore—shows how evangelicalism took the mainstream from the mainline.

A panoramic view of seminary trends will help set the battle scene.

Among the 20 largest seminaries, evangelicals have moved from a minority to a majority since the 1960s. This increased supply of conservative religious leaders likely will continue to expand the evangelical share of the American religious market for decades to come.

Compare the 20 largest seminaries' full-time-equivalent student bodies, as reported in the Factbook of Theological Education, for 1964 and 1997 (see "Breaking Into the Top 20," p. 48). In a little more than three decades, 11 seminaries—over half the list—were displaced by other institutions. Of those 11 that dropped off the list, 10 were mainline institutions.

Of the 11 new names on the 1997 list, only three were mainline institutions. The transformation is even more dramatic in the top 10, changing from a 50/50 split in 1964 to the mainline barely holding on to the last spot in 1997.

Only one of the institutions that dropped from the 1964 list, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod's Concordia of Indiana, is affiliated with a growing denomination. In the 1997 list, by contrast, five of the 20 schools belong to the largest conservative denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention.

Moreover, in the interval the Southern Baptists have gone through an internecine "holy war" that left their institutions even more conservative than they had been in the 1960s. This heightens the contrast between the two lists.

This contrast between mainline and evangelical intensifies when we compare the share of total enrollment in the 20 largest schools. In 1964, the evangelical schools enrolled 44 percent of the students in the 20 largest seminaries. By 1997, the evangelical percentage had risen to 79.

This probably understates the actual conservative proportion of students in these schools. The largest conservative seminaries, such as Southwestern Baptist, Fuller, and Trinity Evangelical, have a small proportion of theological liberals. But the largest mainline seminaries, such as Princeton, Candler, and Luther Northwestern, have significant conservative minorities.

A 1990 survey by Edgar W. Mills, for example, found that 39 percent of the students at Princeton Theological Seminary classified their theological views as fundamentalist, evangelical, conservative, or neo-orthodox.

Moreover, the sheer supply of theologically trained Christian leaders has grown markedly in this period. The 20 largest seminaries had 38 percent more students in 1997 than the comparable group in 1964. Not only have evangelical institutions gained a larger share of the top 20 seminaries; they also have contributed a disproportionate share of their growth.

This conservative growth did not result simply from conservative seminaries having more money. While there has been a small gain in the share of conservative institutions among the best-endowed seminaries, this has been due mostly to a few large gifts to a handful of institutions, notably to Asbury.

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March 11 2002, Vol. 46, No. 3