Benjamin Rush notes that Christianity should support government “only from the love of justice and peace.” And he warns against clergy “settling the political affairs of the world.”  This advice seems wise. Clergy are called to a particular vocation, to preach the Gospel, to disciple believers, to administer their churches. They are not generally invested with particular political wisdom and authority over their flocks. They are equal citizens and have every civil right to speak, of course. But wisdom and a proper regard for their office should generally restrain them on political topics, lest their flocks conflate the Gospel with political opinions.

Historian of American religion Thomas Kidd of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary recently shared a quote from Benjamin Rush to Thomas Jefferson:
I agree with you in your wishes to keep religion and government independent of each Other. Were it possible for St. Paul to rise from his grave at the present juncture, he would say to the Clergy who are now so active in settling the political Affairs of the World. “Cease from your political labors, your kingdom is not of this World. Read my Epistles. In no part of them will you perceive me aiming to depose a pagan Emperor, or to place a Christian upon a throne. Christianity disdains to receive Support from human Governments. From this, it derives its preeminence over all the religions that ever have, or ever Shall exist in the World. Human Governments may receive Support from Christianity but it must be only from the love of justice, and peace which it is calculated to produce in the minds of men. By promoting these, and all the Other Christian Virtues by your precepts, and example, you will much sooner overthrow errors of all kind, and establish our pure and holy religion in the World, than by aiming to produce by your preaching, or pamphlets any change in the political state of mankind.”
Rush and Jefferson were corresponding within the context of government established religion, which of course had been the norm in Europe, and really throughout the world, since nearly the beginning of civilization, whether Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or paganism. Jefferson and James Madison successfully worked to end the established Church of England in Virginia, which was supported by tax dollars, and under which dissenters were sometimes persecuted, even imprisoned. The vision of non-established religion eventually prevailed throughout the United States, to the benefit of vibrant Christianity.
Methodists and Baptists at the time Rush wrote this letter, and who supported non-establishment, were surging during the Second Great Awakening, as they evangelized the frontier. Non establishment never meant that religious people or religious institutions should withhold their views from public life. Unlike in post-revolutionary France, the American republic deemed religion in civil society to be a cornerstone of healthy democracy.
Rush notes that Christianity should support government “only from the love of justice and peace.” And he warns against clergy “settling the political affairs of the world.”  This advice seems wise. Clergy are called to a particular vocation, to preach the Gospel, to disciple believers, to administer their churches.
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Delegates have already overturned the legislation of the 2019 General Conference. Now, in the coming week, they’ll roll back decades of United Methodist policies on sexuality and centuries of historic Christian teaching. Progressives are also successfully rolling back longstanding language on “respect” for the “unborn child” and “promoting the diminishment of high abortion rates.” Understandably, progressives are celebrating. Their long-time adversaries are gone, and the denomination is now theirs. 

United Methodism’s governing General Conference, meeting currently in Charlotte, N.C., is enacting a sexual revolution within what used to be, until very recently, America’s third-largest religious group.
So far, in legislative committees, later to be ratified in plenary, delegates by wide margins are disconnecting sex from marriage or even monogamy. Until now, the United Methodist Church officially taught that “sexual relations are affirmed only with the covenant of monogamous, heterosexual marriage.”
But the proposed revision, OK’d by 75 percent in committee, says we “affirm human sexuality as a sacred gift and acknowledge that sexual intimacy contributes to fostering the emotional, spiritual, and physical well-being of individuals and to nurturing healthy sexual relationships that are grounded in love, care and respect.”
That’s it. No mention there of marriage or monogamy. Instead, it celebrates that sexuality is “expressed in wonderfully diverse ways.” And, “We affirm the rights of all people to exercise personal consent in sexual relationships, to make decisions about their own bodies and be supported in those decisions.”
You can contrast the old United Methodist sexual teaching with the new proposal here. The new wording comes from an official recommendation from a denominational commission that crafted updated “Social Principles” for the church.
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Over 4,300 exited churches so far have joined the new Global Methodist Church (GMC), which includes churches from the U.S., Africa, the Philippines, and Europe. Many more U.S. churches will join, but some are skittish about losing autonomy. U.S. Protestant Christianity is increasingly nondenominational, with younger people rarely guided by once-strong multigenerational denominational loyalties. Nearly all U.S. denominations, liberal and conservative, are declining. The GMC, in many ways, will echo the nondenominational world. 

This month is the 100th anniversary of the Methodist Building on Capitol Hill, the stately edifice sitting across from the U.S. Capitol and Supreme Court. Built to house Methodism’s advocacy for Prohibition, the “Methodist Vatican” was derided by Clarence Darrow as the “most brutal, bigoted, ignorant bunch since the Spanish Inquisition.” Its locale, he said, allowed Methodist busybodies to “smell Congressmen’s breath on the way to the Capitol.”
Since 1924, Methodism has suffered a long downward spiral from its peaks of American influence. For most of the 20th century, it was America’s largest Protestant institution. Last year, it suffered a schism over sexuality, resulting in more than 7,660 mostly traditional congregations quitting the denomination. This exodus, perhaps the largest church schism in America since the Civil War, represents 25 percent of United Methodism’s once 30,000 U.S. churches.
Exodus
The deadline for churches to exit United Methodism, which was America’s third-largest religious body, was December 31. Exiting churches needed approval from governing regional bodies, and the last such vote was December 14, when the Texas Conference, centered around Houston, approved four more church exits for a total of 319—or 51 percent—of its once 621 churches.
Conservative congregations were anxious to exit under a temporary church law before the next governing General Conference on April 23 to May 3, 2024, in Charlotte, North Carolina. It’s widely expected, absent many traditionalists, to finally liberalize the church’s policies on marriage and sex. United Methodism will be nearly the last of the once paramount mainline Protestant denominations to liberalize.
Church properties in United Methodism are owned by the denomination through local regional conferences. In 2019, at a special General Conference that reaffirmed traditional teachings on marriage and sex by 53 percent, delegates created the temporary policy to let churches exit with property and assets. Exiting congregations had to vote by two-thirds and pay hefty exit fees to the denomination. Small churches paid thousands of dollars, and larger churches had to pay hundreds of thousands—sometimes millions.
Issues
Unlike other historically liberal mainline denominations, such as the Episcopal Church and Presbyterian Church (USA), United Methodism has never liberalized on sex. That was thanks to delegates from its growing churches in Africa, where there are 7 million United Methodists, compared to less than 6 million in America before the exits. Conservatives in the U.S., aligned with those in Africa, prevented liberalization for decades.
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For decades, the NCC had hundreds of employees and large budgets, and the council commanded respect as a pillar of American civil society. It was for public religion what the American Bar Association was for lawyers. It still has 37 member denominations. But, like those denominations, it is a shell of its former self, with a small staff and budget. What remains of the NCC is nestled in a small suite in the Methodist Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. What happened?

What happens when churches go vague on theology and detailed on politics? With the National Council of Churches (NCC), currently celebrating its 75th anniversary, we have the answer.
Have you ever heard of the NCC? If you are under age 60, likely not. But for decades it was the premier liberal voice for Protestant Christianity in America. In 1958 President Dwight Eisenhower laid the cornerstone on the new building in New York that would house the NCC and other Protestant agencies, in a tribute to their wide influence. Newspapers boasted that the new 19-story Interchurch Center, built with help from the Rockefellers, would house 37 Protestant denominations representing 40 million Americans and 144,000 congregations. Occupants included the Methodists, Presbyterians, Reformed Church, and American Baptists, and a host of mainline Protestant agencies.
For decades, the NCC had hundreds of employees and large budgets, and the council commanded respect as a pillar of American civil society. It was for public religion what the American Bar Association was for lawyers. It still has 37 member denominations. But, like those denominations, it is a shell of its former self, with a small staff and budget. What remains of the NCC is nestled in a small suite in the Methodist Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. What happened?
An early slogan for the ecumenical movement at the 20th century’s dawn was “doctrine divides, service unites.”
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The progressive Protestant project of North America and Northwestern Europe is fast concluding. It abandoned orthodoxy early in the 20th century in favor of a cold modernism that rejected supernaturalism in favor of stern moral reform. That focus on science and rationality gave way to postmodern self-discovery and deconstruction, with obsession over self-identity, including race and ethnicity, but most especially of late sexuality and gender.

There was an online hullaballoo last week about the “sparkle creed” at a very progressive Lutheran church outside Minneapolis. Offered as a substitute for more traditional creeds, the clergywoman cited God as “nonbinary,” having “two dads”.
A Fox News segment reported on the sparkle creed as a “crisis” for Christianity. But no one needs to worry that Christian orthodoxy is seriously threatened by sparkle theology.
The cleric at Edina Community Lutheran Church cited her belief in the “rainbow spirit who shatters our image of one white light and refracts it into a rainbow of gorgeous diversity.” What does that mean?  Likely neither she nor the congregation that stood to join her could really explain.
The church’s website highlights the congregation’s advocacy for “LGBTQIA+, inclusion, racial justice and ecofaith.” It also cites immigration and “reproductive justice.” And it highlights misdeeds towards native peoples:
We acknowledge that Edina Community Lutheran Church is located on the traditional, ancestral and contemporary lands of the Dakhóta Oyáte*, the Dakota nation. Treaties developed through exploitation and violence were broken. Tribes were forced to exist on ever smaller amounts of land.
Acknowledging this painful history, we as a congregation confess our complicity in the theft of Native land and acknowledge that we have not yet honored our treaties. We further confess that Christians and Christian churches have benefited from this land theft. We commit to being active advocates for justice for Native People and to truth telling that leads to healing.
Do any native people attend Edina Community Lutheran Church?  Most churches with native people tend to be more traditional and more focused on traditional Christian work, not the activism preferred by some white liberal Protestant churches. And the overall project of theological deconstruction almost entirely belongs to white progressives in fast declining Mainline Protestant denominations.
Theological progressives often herald their latest favorite fads as representing the inevitable future. And some dour traditionalists gladly collaborate in this prediction. After all, isn’t the world, and the church, constantly degenerating to ever new depths of depravity? And nothing can be done but complain!
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By the end of next year (the deadline for exiting with church property) at least 3,000 and possibly 5,000 churches are expected to exit. United Methodism has 30,000 U.S. churches. Denominational agencies are preparing for a 38 percent drop in funding for 2025-2028, which implies an approximate expected membership loss of 2.3 million members from the nearly 6.3 million the denomination had in the United States in 2020. That is not a minor exodus.

Just days ago, 487 United Methodist churches were approved for disaffiliation from the denomination, bringing the total of ratified exits to 1,314. Hundreds more have already voted to exit and are awaiting final approval. Almost all of them are theologically conservative churches anticipating the denomination’s official and enthusiastic liberalization on LGBTQ issues when its governing General Conference meets in 2024.
By the end of next year (the deadline for exiting with church property) at least 3,000 and possibly 5,000 churches are expected to exit. United Methodism has 30,000 U.S. churches. Denominational agencies are preparing for a 38 percent drop in funding for 2025-2028, which implies an approximate expected membership loss of 2.3 million members from the nearly 6.3 million the denomination had in the United States in 2020. That is not a minor exodus.
Most exiting churches, perhaps 80-90 percent, are expected eventually to join the new Global Methodist Church. On the other hand, White’s Chapel United Methodist Church outside Dallas typically has nearly 6,000 worshippers weekly, making it one of the denomination’s largest. On Nov. 7, 93 percent of 2,505 voting church members resolved to exit United Methodism, surprising many observers, since the church is not known as particularly conservative.
White’s Chapel evidently does not want United Methodist progressivism nor Global Methodism’s conservatism. So the congregation is forming what it calls a “Methodist Collegiate College” “to create a new form of connectionalism — one of shared ministry, equal accountability, and practical governance.” The church wants to retain “Wesleyan Theology” and “Methodist traditions, rites & rituals” while escaping denominational ownership of property, payments to the denomination, appointment of clergy by bishops, and oversight of clergy ordination by the denomination. It hopes to put “people over polity.”
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After 2023, there is no clear path for United Methodist congregations to exit the denomination without losing their property. The 2024 General Conference could approve another exit pathway but it unlikely to do so. Paragraph 2553 was ratified by the 2019 Special General Conference by less than 52 percent, with traditionalists supporting and liberals opposing. Traditionalists are not expected to have a majority in 2024.      

United Methodist exits are accelerating, as at least 260 of 779 churches in the North Carolina Conference, or one third, have voted to disaffiliate or plan to next year, according to The Carolina Journal.  United Methodist churches, whose property is owned by the denomination through the local “conference,” can vote to exit the liberalizing denomination, with their property and a one-time payment, before the end of 2023.
Meanwhile, 118 churches, or 28 percent of the total, have notified the Peninsula-Delaware Conference that they plan to exit, the conference’s trustees announced. This number shocked conference officials, as the churches organized within only a few weeks when notified that Bishop Latrelle Easterling was going to impose a 50% real estate value surcharge on exit costs after the arbitrary deadline. The exiting churches contribute $1.4 million to the conference’s budget, which was $4.8 million in 2021. It’s believed another 75-100 churches would like to leave but failed to meet the deadline. Possibly some will litigate.
Additionally, Dallas-area St. Andrew United Methodist Church of Plano, with 6500 members, has voted to exit United Methodism. Its pastor is Arthur Jones, son of Houston Bishop Scott Jones, and nephew of former Duke Divinity School dean Greg Jones. “The historical Methodist theology and our focus on Jesus is what we aim to protect,” the church explained about its exit.
The church’s website notes that the church’s now deceased former longtime pastor had started considering disaffiliation years ago and asked church leaders to “monitor the inevitable fragmenting of the United Methodist Church.”  That pastor died in July but had left a recording urging disaffiliation.
At least 500 UMC churches in the state of Texas, including four of the top six by membership, have exited or plan to, according to The Dallas Morning News. St. Andrew is the state’s seventh-largest United Methodist church.
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