Methodism’s Prohibition Bishop & Lesbian Bishop

The United Methodist Church’s Western Jurisdiction has defied church law regarding sexual ethics by electing as bishop an openly avowed lesbian married to another woman. Karen Oliveto of Glide Church in San Francisco is a long-time LGBTQ activist and exponent of radical theology and politics. The church’s South Central Jurisdiction has asked the church’s top court, the Judicial Council, to address the legality of her election.

Although it includes the West Coast, Rocky Mountain states and Desert Southwest, the very liberal and fast declining Western Jurisdiction includes only about 2 percent of United Methodism’s global over 12 million membership. It long ago was said that Georgia has more United Methodists than the Western Jurisdiction. Now it can be said that the North Georgia Conference by itself has more members than a region including 10 mostly fast growing states in continental USA, plus Hawaii and Alaska. Very likely in the next decade the Western Jurisdiction, as it further declines with greater speed, will be disassembled, with pieces attached to other jurisdictions, maybe with the creation of a new missionary region that can rebuild what was lost.

In United Methodism jurisdictions elect their own bishops without wider ecclesial. approval. In contrast, under the Episcopal Church system, when the Diocese of New Hampshire nominated Gene Robinson as the their denomination’s first ever openly homosexual bishop, approval was required and gained from the Episcopal Church’s General Convention, setting in motion an ongoing Anglican schism in North America and globally over the last 13 years. The Episcopal Church’s membership decline accelerated, and New Hampshire lost about 20 percent of members under Bishop Robinson, who’s since retired and is now a fellow with the politically liberal Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C.

Unlike the Episcopal Church and other declining USA Mainline Protestant bodies, liberals in United Methodism have failed to liberalize the denomination’s official teaching on marriage, thanks mostly to their own membership losses while conservative overseas United Methodist churches grow. So United Methodist liberals have in recent years touted defiance of church law, which officially teaches monogamy in male-female marriage and celibacy in singleness. Oliveto’s election is the latest defiance.

For many liberal United Methodists, LGBTQ affirmation is the primary justice cause of the day demanding church affirmation. Political social justice advocacy has been a theme of liberal Methodism and much of Mainline Protestantism since early in the 20th century, with a presumed univeralism/syncretism that doesn’t prioritize evangelism or discipleship. Instead, the church’s primary calling is to urge and model egalitarian political social justice. Over the last century there have been many urgent political crusades touted by zealous church activists who claimed their cause of the moment was crucial to God’s Kingdom on earth.

The first such social justice cause for 20th century Methodism was Prohibitionism, which imagined that the legal elimination of alcohol from society would establish public righteousness in which sober Americans were safer, healthier, kinder, more virtuous, more generous and a light unto the rest of the suffering world. It was Methodism’s greatest political success, for a time, and then its greatest failure, after Prohibition’s collapse, from which Methodist social witness and cultural influence never fully recovered.

Bishop James Cannon was a leading light of the Prohibition movement. He helped lead the Anti-Saloon League and led southern Methodism’s temperance cause. Sardonic journalist H. L. Mencken said of Cannon, of whom he was a critic but also an eventual friend who admired his political prowess, that “Congress was his troop of Boy Scouts and Presidents trembled whenever his name was mentioned.” Voluntary temperance, rooted in Wesleyan and Christian teaching, was noble. Coerced, stated imposed temperance as a Gospel imperative was more questionable. Prohibition did decrease alcohol usage and arguably accomplished some good, while also feeding corruption and disrespect for the law, making it unsustainable.

Although theologically orthodox, Cannon was not very interested in evangelism or Christian discipleship. His mission for decades was a political cause, on which he focused with myopic and frenzied ardor. Much of Methodism followed him, tacitly agreeing that God’s Kingdom could be enacted through constitutional amendment and more funding for Treasury Department agents to enforce it. Some Methodist conservatives disapproved Cannon and aspects of the Prohibition Movement, believing it a utopian human cause that misunderstood fallen human nature and overestimated the ability to perfect human society, while distracting the church from Gospel proclamation and personal holiness.

Cannon succcessfully campaigned for traditionally Democratic southern states to vote Republican in 1928 against the pro-booze Democrat Al Smith. But Prohibition and Cannon’s career imploded with the Great Depresssion. Methodism eventually moved on to other social justice causes, always involving the expansion of state power in pursuit of societal perfection, but was never again as successful or as influential. Never again was there a Methodist bishop who could make presidents and congressmen “tremble,” fortunately.

The LGBTQ cause within the church is similar to Prohibitionism in its utopian desire to reinvent human reality and coercively impose upon society an artificial and ultimately unsustainable social construct at odds with human nature and creation. It also like Prohibition and other radical Social Gospel movements is rooted deeply in American culture and speaks in the language not of the universal, historic church but of American political categories, centered on personal autonomy. Methodism with Mainline Protestantism has suffered from a largely one-nation ecclesiology captive to the here and now while excluding the corrective voice of saints outside the present culture.

Over the last 30 years United Methodism, unlike the rest of liberal USA Mainline Protestantism, has become a global church. Within a decade or less most church members will be outside the USA, mostly Africa, where 41 percent of the church now resides. A majority of the 9 member Judicial Council that will adjudicate Bishop Oliveto’s legal status are from outside the USA.

A global church has its own inevitable tensions but it also is more protected from the preoccupations of particular cultures, USA or otherwise. No church should subordinate its core Gospel message to the political fads of its own time and place, which may seem compelling at the time, but considerably less so upon later consideration. Protestants have been especially prone to national churches. But with the rise of Western secularism and surging global Christianity, most such denominations will not survive without enhanced collaboration with and appreciation of the universal church, on earth, and across history. Such church universality will both protect the church’s message and enlarge its appeal.