A New Wesleyan Political Witness

Here’s my message today at Asbury Theological Seminary during chapel for the new Wesleyan Holiness Pentecostal Studies Center.

It’s a pleasure and honor to speak at Asbury, with which I’ve long felt a deep affinity.  Often friend requests on Facebook will tell me that I attended Asbury with them, which signals that in fact we’re actually strangers, but I’m always flattered by the association.

Whatever health and vigor that exists in United Methodism and in the larger U.S. Wesleyan world today is largely due to Asbury’s intellectual and spiritual influence.   Whether they realize it or not, the over 12 million members of United Methodism globally owe Asbury a great debt of gratitude, as do many more in the other Wesleyan denominations.  

We’re living in troubled times for Christianity and especially for United Methodism, but all times are troubled to varying degrees.  And all times offer unique opportunities for service to the Kingdom of God.  The greater the evils arrayed against us, the greater the opportunity for Christian witness and triumph.  We should always thank God for providentially placing us exactly where He has in a particular time and place where we are needed.

You already know the challenges we confront.  Much of our culture in the U.S. is increasingly hostile to orthodox Christian expression and practice.  The largest Wesleyan denomination in the U.S. and the world is rent by division over theology and sex, amid increasing talk of schism.  And even where orthodox and robust, the Wesleyan message is today’s American Christianity seems often overshadowed by the intellectual prowess and organizational skills of Reformed Christianity.  

My own organization has been focused for 33 years on encouraging a thoughtful Christian political and social witness for our churches rooted in orthodox faith and ecclesial accountability.  At the time of our founding, much of what was then Mainline Protestant Christianity had succumbed to extreme forms of Liberation Theology and was supporting globally a Marxist political theology as the solution to poverty and injustice.  This commitment entailed ignoring human rights abuses and religious liberty, even as many Christians and other persons of conscience suffered for their faith under the regimes this church witness extolled.  And this public theology, to which much of official United Methodism subscribed, was essentially materialist, focusing on expanding centralized state power to guarantee the delivery of food, housing and health care, at the expense of liberty and eternal verities, and in the process, failing to successfully provide even those material basics.

The founding statement of my organization composed in 1981 by Richard Neuhaus declared:  

As a universal community, the Church witnesses to the limits of the national and ideological loyalties that divide mankind. Communal allegiance to Christ and his Kingdom is the indispensable check upon the pretensions of the modern state. Because Christ is Lord, Caesar is not Lord. By humbling all secular claims to sovereignty, the Church makes its most important political contribution by being, fully and unapologetically, the Church. While our first allegiance is to the community of faith and its mission in the world, Christians do not withdraw from participation in other communities. To the contrary, we are called to be leaven and light in movements of cultural, political, and economic change. History is the arena in which Christians exercise their discipleship. Because our hope is eternal and transcendent, Christians can participate in society without despair or delusion. We do not despair of the meaning of history, nor do we delude ourselves that our efforts are to be equated with establishing the Kingdom of God. The fulfillment of history’s travail is the promised Rule of God, not the establishment of our human programs and designs.   

 
The failure of much of Mainline Protestantism’s political witness in the 20th century was due to this confusion over the kingdom of man versus the Kingdom of God.   Much of Methodism led the way starting early in the last century, propelled forward by the Social Gospel’s very idealistic vision of a society without poverty and pain.  Just as most of Methodism in America was liberalizing theologically, it was fully mobilized behind and successfully persuading the United States to adopt Prohibition, which it portrayed as a panacea for most of the nation’s ills.    The over dozen years of Prohibition were the height of influence for Methodism’s social witness in America and also the source of its downfall, as Methodism arguably never fully recovered its cultural or political influence after its failure and revocation.      

Methodists across the theological spectrum rallied to Prohibition.  But after its failure, the church’s social witness was owned almost exclusively by the church’s left-wing.   Methodism in the 1930s renounced capitalism and war and imagined a new society largely liberated from human sin and frailty.  The Methodist Church’s unqualified embrace of contraceptives in 1956 was a significant social milestone, and its 1970 embrace of unrestricted abortion rights even more so.  The debate over homosexuality began formally for United Methodism in 1972.  Meanwhile, that denomination’s stances on economics, foreign policy, the environment and criminal justice became increasingly ideological in the 1960s and 1970s, literally becoming revolutionary during the Cold War’s final years as church agencies backed Marxist revolutionary movements like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.   Most of these political stances, to the limited extent they were known to most church members, were a cause for estrangement between the local church and national church structures.

Meanwhile, other smaller forms of Wesleyan expression typically lacked a formal, sustained denominational political witness.  But several of these denominations, like the Free Methodists, the Wesleyans, the Church of the Nazarene, the Salvation Army and the Pentecostal churches, belonged to the National Association of Evangelicals, which issued its own political pronouncements that were invariably on the right, such as affirming capital punishment, backing school prayer, and urging vigorous U.S. defense and foreign policies against the Soviet Bloc.  Some members of these other Wesleyan bodies, including several prominent clergy, became leaders in the Religious Right that emerged in the late 1970s and remained influential across 4 decades.  

If the Religious Left had Social Gospel proponent William Rauschenbush as one of its original theorists, the modern Religious Right had Francis Schaeffer, a conservative Presbyterian from Westminster Seminary who artfully welded traditional American post WWII Cold War conservatism with a Calvinistic critique of society and history.  As a young man in high school and college, increasingly concerned about the policies of my own United Methodist denomination, and searching for alternative models, I vividly recall listening to leaders of the new Religious Right, like Jerry Falwell, to whose magazine, unapologetically called The Fundamentalist, I subscribed, and from which subscription I earned as a premium Schaeffer’s seminal book, “How Then Shall We Live,” which led to reading his other works.  

The Religious Right was rooted in a broad Evangelicalism that was not so much a deep Christian tradition as a 20th century American movement.   Lacking deep ecclesial roots, modern conservative Evangelicals relied on the Schaeffer inspired narrative as their guiding public theology.   But that vision has largely lost steam, and a new generation of Evangelicals is somewhat politically adrift.  Many of them are withdrawing from political engagement, disheartened by ostensibly lost cultural battles, and unmotivated by any available Christian argument for social renewal.    Calvinism remains the dominant intellectual force in orthodox American Protestant and Evangelical life.  But our Calvinist friends are somewhat divided, disenchanted by the old Religious Right formula, tempted by social withdrawal, but also compelled by their tradition, however dourly, to confront society with the Gospel’s demands for divine justice.

The Wesleyan voice for social witness in America is even more disorganized, divided and confused.   The political witness of United Methodism and its predecessor bodies was on the left side of the American spectrum starting in the 1930s. Arguably it began to leave the framework of historic Christian moral orthodoxy in 1956 when it endorsed contraception without serious qualifications.  More decisively it left it when it endorsed, after a 20 minute debate, unrestricted abortion on demand at the 1970 General Conference, over the strong objections of Methodism’s then most prominent theologian Albert Outler and most prominent ethicist Paul Ramsey.  This departure from Christian moral consensus of course facilitated the formal debate over homosexuality that began in 1972and whose final chapter is yet unwritten.  

Also significant is the proliferation of political issues that United Methodism began to address after the 1968 General Conference, before which there typically were only a half dozen or so political resolutions that were printed at the end of the Book of Discipline.  After 1968 a new publication emerged called the Book of Resolutions, at first a few dozen pages and later approaching about 1000 pages, full of hundreds of urgent pronouncements, few of which were ever made known to many at the local church level.  This Book of Resolutions empowered United Methodism’s Washington political witness office to advocate and lobby on scores of political issues every year over the last five decades, again largely without the informed engagement of most church members or any strong sense of hierarchy or priority regarding the relative importance of these issues.  Predictably, the lack of focus and lack of genuine local level support made this form of scattershot political witness by United Methodism ineffective with the lawmakers and policy makers it was intended to influence.  

Although professing to speak for what were originally 11 million church members, United Methodism’s political witness, headquartered in the historic and magnificent Methodist Building on Capitol Hill, originally constructed with great fanfare by the old Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals, became indistinguishable from secular left wing activism.  Even on the Religious Left, United Methodism’s political witness, which included funding programs and grants by the New York missions board, plus pronouncements from the Council of Bishops, lost recognizably Wesleyan distinctives.  United Methodist political advocacy merely echoed other theologically liberal mainline Protestant denominations, most of which also had Washington lobby offices, often in the Methodist Building. United Methodist political witness merged into generic Religious Left activism, offering a mostly materialistic political theology heavily invested in centralized government’s expansive social welfare and regulatory state, rejecting or minimizing the state’s vocation for police and military powers, and mostly ratifying the Sexual Revolution by accepting its anthropology of atomized, self-empowered individuals liberated from nature, natural law and traditional Christian teaching.

My own direct involvement in United Methodism’s political witness began when I was a student in the 1980s and deeply troubled by my denomination’s official lack of interest in human rights and even religious liberty in totalitarian regimes because supposedly those regimes prioritized the poor.  I was also struck by the vast chasm between United Methodism’s official political witness and the typical beliefs of most laity, who remained almost completely uninformed about their church’s political witness.  Most clergy were understandably happy to let this ignorance continue, not wanting controversy.

The political witness of the other more conservative Wesleyan bodies during those years and now had its own issues.  Most smaller Wesleyan denominations and Pentecostal churches lacked and still lack a formal political witness process.  None have Washington offices.  Most belong to the National Association of Evangelicals and largely outsource their political witness to it and its Washington office.  NAE was until recent years consistently, conventionally on the right.  Its pronouncements probably accurately represented most of its constituency.  Often there was serious theological reelection behind them.  But there was just as often a lack of hierarchy of issues and clear priorities.  More recently, the NAE with active support from some Wesleyan bodies has become somewhat more like the mainline Protestant political witness, speaking prophetically to its own constituency instead of striving to speak for it.  Sometimes the NAE in recent years on some issues has aligned with the Evangelical Left as it worked to craft a new identity distinct from its previously predictable religious and political conservatism.

A decade ago the NAE crafted a treatise for its political witness called “For the Health of the Nations.”  My predecessor as IRD President, herself an Asbury College graduate, was an active participant in its creation.  But she was somewhat ambivalent about its urgent, sweeping tone, which strove to address a plethora of supposedly equally compelling causes simultaneously.  She almost certainly agreed with Richard Neuhaus, who sarcastically opined there was little in the treatise about which to disagree, but one was left wondering when there would be time to sleep, as Evangelicals crusaded fervently for so very many causes at the same time.

So there is today very little on which to model a comprehensive, thoughtful Wesleyan political and social witness.  The fault is perhaps traceable to John Wesley himself, who unlike John Calvin and John Knox, who guide our Reformed friends, did not really articulate any distinctive theory of the state.  There are Calvinist, Lutheran, Anglican, Catholic and Orthodox traditions of political theology.  It’s less clear whether there is a definite Wesleyan one.  Methodists have traditionally been more renown as doers than theorists, so the absence is not surprising if still unhelpful.  The other church traditions of political theology offer centuries of guidance, articulated by thinkers across generations.  Methodism’s understanding of political witness seems to skip from Wesley in 18th century England to the Social Gospel activism of the early 20th century, which was mostly crafted by non-Wesleyans.  

Nineteenth century Methodism was a surging powerful social force that deeply shaped the ethos of American democracy.  But there seem to have been few Methodist thinkers who distinctively articulated a Wesleyan way of statecraft.   Methodists were in the thick of all the major political controversies and social reform movements of that day.  But again, they were activists and apparently not theorists.  They left us an example of action but not a very clear paper trail of how we should understand our tradition.  

The Temperance and Prohibition movements that crystallized in the late nineteenth century were the cherished political fruit of that era’s Methodist piety.  They adopted the Calvinist Puritan view of America as a called out nation providentially summoned to greatness and holiness.  But they importantly added Methodism’s distinct, hopeful confidence in perfecting a holy society that successfully conquers all major social vices.  The original Methodist Prohibitionists were mostly theologically orthodox and believed in the power of human sin and the need for personal repentance.  But they assumed the Holy Spirit could and would conquer all social vice just as the Spirit could perfect the individual believer.  Methodist perfectionism both made Prohibitionism initially a success and also inevitably an ultimate failure.

But Methodist Prohibitionists and their socially reforming predecessors, starting with Wesley himself, offer us important counsel for crafting a new Wesleyan social and political witness that is both pertinent to our own times while still firmly rooted to our tradition.   This process should replicate their crusading confidence while mindful that society this side of the Eschaton will not be perfected.

Wesley acknowledged as much.  Sinful though his Britain was, he thought the British constitutional system, based on the great political Whig compromise of 1688, the greatest in secular history.  He firmly rejected the millenarianism and revolutionary spirit of the Puritans in the previous century.   He was an incremental social reformer.

The two political issues on which he spoke most famously were slavey and the American Revolution.  The latter stance of course embarrassed Francis Asbury and early Methodists, who would enthusiastically embrace America’s new republic. But Wesley’s opposition to slavery remains instructive today.

Based on our unique Wesleyan history, here are my suggestions for a new Wesleyan social and political witness that I think could form a consensus among the various major Wesleyan, Holiness and Pentecostal traditions.  My suggestions assert that our tradition, like most Protestant traditions, does not command the history, universality and resources available to Roman Catholicism, whose social witness and social teaching can teach us much but likely cannot be replicated by Wesleyans at this point in our fractured situation.  We will do best to avoid the Religious Left and Right’s proclivity of trying to address many major issues with a faith perspective with equal frenzy and lack of careful reflection.  The Catholic tradition, even with magnificent resources, firmly emphasizes a hierarchy of teachings and issues. Not all issues are equally important in the providence of God within the purview of the church.

So first let me suggest that Methodists should still oppose slavery, which incredibly persists, in the form of sexual trafficking especially.  Millions globally are sexually trafficked, mostly starting as minors, and their plight should grieve Wesleyans and summon us to action.  Sex trafficking of course is intrinsically linked to prostitution and pornography, both of which should also be central to Wesleyan social witness, both for their toll on individual victims and their pervasive corrupting wider social influence.  At the 2012 General Conference one of our young staffers noticed almost the complete absence of concern about pornography, which he saw as confirmation that a United Methodism is a church of mostly old people.

Reaching the non old necessitates addressing issues like pornography within the context of a larger Christian anthropology of marriage, the body, sex, and the identity of each person with sacred life as the image bearer of God.

The original Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals had five major emphases:  liquor, drugs, prostitution, gambling and what they called “salacious literature,” i. e. pornography.  These were the consensus social witness issues of Methodism then and I believe deservedly can be today.  

Obviously we shouldn’t seek a repeat of Prohibition for liquor but addressing its abuse should remain a permanent priority.  So too dangerous narcotics, whose increasingly faddish legalization should trouble Wesleyans and call us to action.  And likewise for gambling, which continues to seduce as a supposed source of prosperity and tax income even as it impoverishes and corrupts communities.  

Neither on sex nor on drugs nor on gambling can Methodists, if faithful to who we are, be abstract libertarians who prioritize autonomous choice over the wider social good.  Methodists have always and should always believe in upholding the bonds that gently but firmly cleave society together, which depend on communal morality, virtue and charity, expressed individually and corporately, including through law and public policy.  

Our Wesleyan political witness if effective must be based on our tradition, upon consensus among our communities, upon a clear Christian anthropology, upon realism about the opposition, and promoted with winsome hopefulness and confidence, not entirely unlike the misplaced but unfailing zeal of the early Methodist Prohibitionists.  A Wesleyan social witness that focuses on and specializes on slavery and sex trafficking, alcohol and drug abuse, prostitution and pornography and gambling, would apply our resources and legacy strategically and potentially very effectively. It would communicate Christ-focused measured humanitarianism, enacted through the lens of Wesleyan understanding, concretely operating in the real world, not utopia.

Winston Churchill once privately likened the often hectoring, preachy Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to a Methodist parson, which he definitely did not intend as a compliment.  We as Wesleyans needn’t hector but we can and should in faithfulness to our spiritual legacy and divine calling advocate for a more loving, godly humane society through a peculiarly Methodist social and political witness.