By Mark Tooley on 1.7.11 @ 6:07AM
A prominent Tea Party activist recently called for shutting
down the 7.8 million United Methodist Church, exciting the Huffington Post
and various liberal bloggers. Tea Party Nation President
Judson Phillips last month saw and disliked a banner at the
Methodist Building on Capitol Hill demanding: "Pass the
DREAM Act." The sign referred, of course, to now failed
legislation seeking to legalize some illegal aliens brought
to the U.S. as minors.
"I have a DREAM," Phillips responded. "That is, no
more United Methodist Church." He recalled having left
Methodism as a teenager because the denomination is
"little more than the first Church of Karl Marx" and the
"'religious arm' of socialism."
Phillips notes, not inaccurately, that the Methodist
denomination, officially, is "pro-illegal immigration" and
"in the bag for socialist health care," opposed U.S. force
after 9/11, is big on Global Warming, and is anti-Israel.
"In short, if you hate America, you have a great
future in the Methodist church," Phillips concluded, while
admitting "some good people" and a "few decent ministers"
persist at the "local level." The "few remaining patriots"
in Methodism should quit their denomination, he urged. And
the Tea Partier observed that his dream of Methodism's
death could happen "sooner, rather than later," given the
denomination's imploding demographics.
One United Methodist bishop responded to Phillips'
"visceral attacks," which she said reflected neither
"American values nor the Christian faith." But she did
pledge to pray for him even while he was dreaming of
Methodism's demise. This particular bishop, from Arizona,
is especially outspoken for Methodism's virtual open
borders advocacy. Ironically, Methodism in Arizona, whose
state population is over one third Hispanic, has almost no
Hispanic congregations. United Methodism across the U.S.
is less than 2 percent Hispanic and is overwhelmingly
white Anglo and aging. Once America's largest Protestant
church, the denomination has lost over 3 million members,
with almost no end in sight for its U.S. section. In
contrast, African United Methodism is growing rapidly and
will eventually be a majority of the church.
My own experience growing up Methodist is not
dissimilar to Phillips'. As a boy in a 1970s Sunday school
class, I never forgot an official United Methodist Sunday
school lesson focused on the injustice of interning
Japanese Americans during World War II. Although
historically interesting, it did not seem like a Bible
lesson. And it did evince that the Religious Left has long
commonly portrayed the U.S as a uniquely malevolent force
in the world. We didn't have any Sunday school lessons
about imperial Japanese atrocities, or the Nazi Holocaust
against the Jews.
If Phillips had visited the Methodist Building 25
years ago, he would have found much more to justify his
critique. The nearly 90-year-old prominent lobby presence
right across from the U.S. Capitol and U.S. Supreme Court
during the 1980s was busily advocating on behalf of the
Sandinistas, El Salvador's Marxist guerrillas, and
numerous other dubious, oppressive causes. These
outrageous stances by Methodist and other Mainline
Protestant elites, effectively siding with totalitarianism
during the Cold War, motivated me as a college student to
start working for reform in my denomination, eventually
leading to my current employment with the Institute on
Religion and Democracy.
Unlike Phillips seemingly, I did not equate the far
left politics of denominational elites with the church as
a whole. My own local congregation was conservative
leaning and completely unaware of the Methodist lobby
office, though it stood less than 10 miles away from my
Arlington, Virginia church. Today, as then, Methodists and
most Mainline Protestants are largely oblivious to the
official church lobbyists who claim to represent them. One
poll shows that 14 percent of Tea Partiers are Mainline
Protestant. But the United Methodist Church's official
support for "single-payer" health care prompted U.S. House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi publicly to thank the denomination by
name for helping to pass Obamacare, shocking many
previously oblivious church members.
The vast array of political stances by United
Methodism and many Mainline Protestant groups (Methodism's
"Book of Resolutions" has over 1,000 pages) are approved
mostly without substantive debate at church conventions.
Non-liberal delegates usually conserve their energy for
theological debates. Although uninformed, and mostly
unsupportive when informed, local church members still
fund and are ultimately responsible for the political
lobbying waged by their denominations.
Wishing death for Methodism or other Mainline
denominations seems harsh. Wracked by decades of decline,
these churches are reaping the whirlwind of nearly 100
years of Social Gospel liberalism. But there remain large
pockets of orthodoxy and vibrancy. With its large and
growing overseas membership, United Methodism is
especially prone for a comeback, even as its most liberal
U.S. regions fade or die.
A recent survey showed Methodism on the West Coast,
where it is most liberal, lost almost 8 percent of
membership in just four recent years. The more moderate
Southeast U.S. lost only about 1 percent. Overseas African
churches, focused on evangelism and not on politics,
gained nearly 30 percent in the same four-year period.
Phillips may be correct that demographics ultimately
address Methodist liberalism. But I pray it's the church's
renewal through its growing international membership,
rather than its demise. And hopefully, a decade from now,
the banners on the Capitol Hill Methodist Building will be
less offensive, not just to Tea Partiers, but also to most
Methodists.
