ONE OF AMERICA’S largest Protestant denominations voted in May to prohibit the solemnization of same-sex unions in its churches, to withhold ordination from practicing homosexuals, to ban church funding for “gay” causes, to require celibacy for its single clergy, and to endorse civil laws that define marriage as uniting a man and a woman. And it wasn’t the Southern Baptists.
No, all this occurred at the governing General Conference of the United Methodist Church, a “mainline” denomination whose leadership has been decidedly liberal for decades. Over 8 million strong, the United Methodists are the third largest church in the United States after the Roman Catholics and the Southern Baptists, and the turn they have taken on the issue of homosexuality is almost directly opposite to that of the quintessential mainline group, the Episcopalians.
The Episcopal Church–only one-fourth the size of the United Methodists–has been much in the spotlight since the election of its first openly homosexual bishop last year. Advocates of approving homosexuality hoped the Episcopal Church was a harbinger of America’s religious future. But the Methodists aren’t following its lead.
The United Methodists have always been Main Street, to the Episcopalians’ Wall Street. They are more suburban and small town than the Episcopalians, more southern and midwestern, and on the whole more culturally conservative. United Methodists are also highly international. Almost one-third of the U.S.-based denomination is now overseas, mostly in Africa. This represents not only growth abroad but also diminishing numbers at home.
Methodism was America’s largest church as recently as the late 19th century, but after 40 years of continuous decline, the United Methodists have gone from 11 million to 8.3 million in the United States. Meanwhile, their former mission churches in places like the Congo, Angola, and Mozambique are surging. Full of enthusiastic recent converts, these congregations are ones where liberal theology holds little sway. Africans and to a lesser extent Filipinos have been crucial to setting United Methodism’s more culturally conservative direction.
In the floor debates over homosexuality at the church’s 2004 General Conference in Pittsburgh, African delegates seized the lead in arguing against any weakening of the church’s stance that homosexual behavior is “incompatible with Christian teaching.”
“We have received teaching on marriage from our missionaries,” explained one delegate from the Congo, noting the rejection of polygamy. “We Africans, we accepted this teaching, and we became Christians.”
A Liberian delegate was blunter than any U.S. delegate would have dared be: “I don’t think the United Methodist Church can license people to go to hell. . . . The church must always speak against every kind of sin.”
About two-thirds of the nearly 1,000 delegates voted to reaffirm and in some cases strengthen the church’s disapproval of homosexual practice. Compromise language that would have acknowledged internal church differences over homosexuality was rejected, though by a smaller margin.
Sixty percent voted that homosexual practice was incompatible with Christian teaching, 72 percent voted to uphold the ban on practicing homosexual clergy, 80 percent reaffirmed the ban on same-sex unions, and 85 percent reaffirmed that clergy must be celibate if single and monogamous if married.
Seventy-seven percent voted to affirm “laws in civil society that define marriage as the union of one man and one woman,” making the United Methodists the first mainline church to adopt a political stance on same-sex unions. The ban on funding of homosexual advocacy by the national church was expanded to include regional bodies. And adultery, premarital sex, homosexual practice, and same-sex ceremonies were all made chargeable offenses that could precipitate church trials.
Supporters of endorsing homosexual behavior responded with anger. “Few expected that there would be any moderation in the denomination’s position regarding sexual orientation,” complained the Rev. Greg Dell, a Chicago pastor put on leave of absence several years ago for conducting a same-sex ceremony. “But not many were ready for the further tightening of the belt of bigotry that is occurring in Pittsburgh.”
After the votes, several hundred demonstrators filled the convention floor in protest, while supportive delegates and bishops stood in solidarity. One delegate smashed a communion chalice to the floor, to symbolize the “breaking” of the denomination.
Many liberal United Methodists believe only fear is keeping the church from following secular society in embracing homosexuality. They are waiting for what they believe is inevitable.
But time is not on their side. Liberal religion is demographically dying in the United States, as it is around the world. Almost all the United Methodist churches in America that are growing are in the deep South. There are now more Methodists in Georgia than in all the Pacific and Rocky Mountain states combined.
The conservative African church, meanwhile, keeps growing. This year, the formerly autonomous Methodist Church of the Ivory Coast, with a million members, joined the United Methodist Church. This raised the non-U.S. component of the denomination from 20 percent to 30 percent.
Church liberals are flummoxed. For decades they styled themselves champions of the Third World. But Third World Christians are conservative on what is, for liberals, the most important cultural issue.
United Methodism, like most old mainline denominations, exerts cultural influence beyond its numbers. Although less than 3 percent of the U.S. population are United Methodists, about 12 percent of members of Congress are, including Hillary Clinton. So are President Bush and Vice President Cheney.
With their historic focus on civic righteousness, United Methodists proliferate in state legislatures, on city councils and school boards, in chambers of commerce and union halls. Polls show that United Methodist lay people tilt slightly Republican in their party preference, but United Methodism’s elites, especially in the national bureaucracy, are reflexively on the left.
Among America’s 160 million church members, only a small percentage belong to denominations that favor legitimizing homosexual behavior. In this instance, the United Methodists are more in tune than Episcopalians with American religion overall–and with middle America. The failure of same-sex “marriage” and other innovations of the sexual revolution to gain validation from the Methodists may prove to reflect the judgment of the nation as a whole.
Mark D. Tooley directs the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy.
