Ineffective Liberal United Methodist Anti-Racism

Prominent recurring arguments against splitting the United Methodist Church have been variations of “look at all the good we could still do together on areas of common ground.” As Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend approaches, one might think that surely United Methodist anti-racism could be one such common cause.

After all, theological progressives have certainly talked a lot about anti-racism. And outsiders have observed how theologically orthodox or “traditionalist” United Methodists are a remarkably multi-ethnic, global coalition. We at the Institute on Religion & Democracy have our history of opposing Apartheid, and as IRD’s UMAction Director, I have spoken out on anti-Asian racism, white nationalism, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd, and also hosted “Conversations about Race.” I sponsored a resolution in my annual conference responding to racism and anti-Semitism.

But it now appears that there is little – and even decreasing – interest from many liberal leaders in working together even in this area. That is how polarized we have become.

There has been some genuine good done in United Methodist anti-racism work by people across the theological spectrum.

And yet there are now serious problems that must be acknowledged, stemming from the irreconcilable nature of United Methodists’ divisions.

First of all, for “Christian social witness” on any issue to have credibility, it is essential for the church to get its own house in order. Secondly, liberal-led United Methodist anti-racism efforts sometimes involved unforced choices to drive away potential allies, and raise suspicions that the righteousness of anti-racism is cynically used as a banner to advance other, less noble agendas.

Let’s take these in order.

American United Methodism is simply not an ethnically diverse denomination. Our U.S. membership remains about 90 percent white.

Most of our denomination’s non-white members live outside of the United States. Americans are no longer the majority of our global denomination.

In terms of systemic racism, IRD/UMAction has for years protested very overt, systemic injustices against our denomination’s predominantly non-white central-conference members, with marginalization in leadership (e.g., here and here), distortion of “global” representation, and funding inequities. And yet when liberal United Methodists personally, politically, and/or financially benefit, they have shown time and again their willingness to maintain and defend such racially tainted injustices.

Then since the 2019 General Conference, numerous liberal Americans promoted and actually pursued collective financial punishment against (primarily African) non-American United Methodists, in order to punish the votes of most of these poorer regions’ delegates. Even liberal California-Nevada Bishop Minerva Carcaño has called out how “attempting to control Central Conferences through withholding funds is manipulative and coercive” and “this withholding is primarily expressed in Caucasian congregations whose perception is that their entitlement to control others with money is an expression of white privilege.”

And despite its rhetoric of United Methodist anti-racism, the Covenant adopted by the 2021 NCJ Conference oddly avoids acknowledging any of these great racial injustices within our denomination.

But NCJ Covenant (which seems representative of liberal leaders throughout American United Methodism) did worse than mere silence.

With this Covenant, liberal American United Methodist leaders displayed a racially arrogant, fundamentally nationalist attitude of asserting the supremacy of their 95-percent-white jurisdiction over most United Methodists of color.

United Methodist Church Governance 101 is that we are a connectional church, not a merely confederate church. So decisions on such major issues as the definition of marriage are decided by the global General Conference, not by more geographically limited contexts. And yet the liberal NCJ delegates chose to go out of their way to adopt this “Covenant” to implicitly replace the global General Conference’s standards on marriage with their own all-American standards, and seemingly call for disregarding the former.

With this Covenant (and similar antics of disobedience), predominantly white liberal American leaders made clear that they are NOT willing to submit to black- and brown-skinned African and Filipino delegates, and declared that as representatives of a 95-percent-white constituency, they are sure that they know better. And in the very same Covenant, they presume to want to lecture others about the evils of white supremacy and white nationalism.

Adding insult to injury, the NCJ Covenant promotes so-called “regionalization” or “contextualization” to subject primarily non-American United Methodists to a new system of separate-and-unequal segregation, in order to protect the privileges and power of predominantly white Americans. According to the United Methodist News Service, when the same basic idea was put before every annual conference, “voters from the central conferences in Africa were the strongest opponents to the proposed changes, rejecting the amendments on restructuring by as many as 4,900 votes out of 5,165 votes cast” (95 percent). By still promoting this bad idea, liberal Americans are refusing to listen to any but a tiny, unrepresentative handful of African voices.

Furthermore, the NCJ Covenant even seems to encourage refusing to wait for proper consultation with non-American regions’ General Conference representatives before implementing major structural change. It calls for the NCJ’s U.S.-only College of Bishops and Mission Council “to immediately begin working with” others around the world to make such global segregation “a reality” (emphasis added).

In a similar spirit, the NCJ’s Bishop Laurie Haller has recently gone out of her way to pick a major fight. The Iowa Annual Conference she leads is astoundingly 98 percent white, which, even in Iowa, is notably less diverse than the state as a whole. As an extraordinarily privileged, rich, powerful white woman, Haller has effectively declared that she and her lily-white little local region know better than allegedly less enlightened African and Filipino delegates to whom she does not need to listen or respect.

At one point, Haller even framed her effective imposition of her own “Haller Discipline” on the Iowa Conference as her having her hand-picked cabinet “willing to encourage its clergy to violate” the global Book of Discipline. This means unilaterally betraying her covenant promises to African and Filipino United Methodists, and treating these as much less important than non-binding political noise from loud white American liberal activists.

This is a rather ugly sort of “white nationalism.”

Another Bishop worth mentioning is John Schol. His record in the Greater New Jersey Conference is irreparably tainted by his extreme, heavy-handed, and unapologetic bullying of Korean-American ministers Jisun Kwak and James Lee.

But it appears that most liberal United Methodist bishops, caucuses, and other leaders across the country have been perfectly willing to give such a rich, powerful white man a free pass in abusing his authority to mistreat vulnerable people of color. After all, Schol is also an outspoken proponent of the LGBTQ+ liberationist cause (and to advance it has displayed a similarly racially arrogant nationalism as his colleague Laurie Haller). So that apparently trumps liberal United Methodists’ other rhetoric about privilege and anti-racism.

One major internal tension within the short-lived Liberation Methodist Connexion (LMX) denomination was whether anti-racism or LGBTQ+ liberation should be a greater priority. Similar debates were part of the 2021 NCJ Conference. Anti-racism ultimately got slightly more votes for top priority than LGBTQ+ inclusion at the NCJ, but this may have been driven by orthodox delegates who agreed with the former but not the latter.

In any case, the above track record indicates that when push comes to shove, the bulk of liberal United Methodism’s leadership views LGBTQ+ inclusion as a much greater priority than anti-racism, even to the point of hurting the latter cause for the sake of the former.

As another example, the Rev. Bob Philips recently wrote about how the LGBTQ-affirming, single-issue voting of liberals resulted in the exclusion of Hispanics and non-native English speakers in delegation elections.

Furthermore, even in liberal-led United Methodist efforts supposedly focused on anti-racism, there seems to be a pattern of needlessly driving away anti-racist Christians who are outside of organizers’ narrow, left-wing ideological bubble.

One United Methodist anti-racism event held last year by liberal officials of one annual conference gratuitously included disparaging remarks against evangelicals and “Trump voters.” One of the main presenters, a “woke” white woman, even made the clearly preposterous claim that in highly politicized debates over Critical Race Theory’s influence in public-school curricula, some states were now actually “banning anything about race to be talked about.” It is easier to paint crazy caricatures of other people when you don’t think they are in the room.

In my own annual conference, the liberal leadership has been heavily promoting its “Covenant to Dismantle Racism.” When I first heard about it, I had really wanted to accept my bishop’s invitation to endorse it. But there is no way I or other theologically orthodox believers could in good conscience sign a statement. Because its writers included liberal intersectional ideology (“recogniz[ing] the intersectionality of injustice”), to the point of broadly opposing “discrimination based on things beyond race such as … sexual orientation” and transgenderism. The liberal leadership’s choice to include such language indicates that they are not really interested in receiving support or cooperation from less liberal United Methodists.

We have previously noted how the official United Methodist anti-racism agency has “undermine[d] its ability to build a broad coalition for combatting racism” by promoting LGBTQ+ liberationist ideology.

Other examples could be cited.

Another needlessly divisive tendency in liberal United Methodist anti-racism efforts has been speaking in ways that are heavy on moral denunciation but unhelpful for understanding the facts of particular situations. Some liberal white bishops seem eager to “virtue signal,” even if this means irresponsibly exaggerating the extent to which particular incidents were clearly racist atrocities (such as a black church burning in which the perpetrator was actually a black parishioner).

The aforementioned Indiana Covenant to Dismantle Racism goes beyond stating values to also make specific factual claims that would not be obvious to most laypeople. But with no documentation offered, the liberal leadership apparently expects us to show that we are among the righteous elect by just blindly and unthinkingly agreeing with whatever they tell us, with no room for questions or critical thinking. (Such an approach to any part of church life is antithetical to what first attracted me into United Methodism.)

Lay United Methodists can see through factually irresponsible exaggerations, limiting room for thoughtful questions, and the bait-and-switch of using the righteous banner of “anti-racism” to promote liberal agendas that have little to do with race. Such patterns may actually result in persuading well-meaning but relatively racially isolated white American United Methodists that racism is less of a problem than they would have otherwise thought!

If anti-racism and racial equality are truly important priorities for church and society, then why would we not want as many hands on deck as possible? It could have been a beautiful thing if liberal United Methodists were truly interested in building a broader, more effective coalition to promote these Christian values, even if it meant working with people in different places along the theological spectrum or who may have voted differently in recent elections. But counter-productive to this is the pattern, seen too often in liberal United Methodists’ anti-racism efforts, of needlessly divisive, partisan rhetoric, shallow virtue signaling, and refusals to address the logs in their own eyes.

But then again, if the primary goal of bureaucratic United Methodist anti-racism is really to advance unrelated agendas and help people within a narrow left-wing ideological bubble to feel superior to others, then this way of doing things may be effective, after all.

And so it seems that much of liberal United Methodism’s leadership is just not interested in working together in good faith with other United Methodists on even as potentially a common-ground issue as anti-racism.

As we go our separate ways, both the liberal post-separation United Methodist Church (psUMC) and the orthodox Global Methodist Church will face their own issues of race. If the split is done fairly, the psUMC will be able to rush forward pursuing its anti-racism in as boldly progressive and intersectional a way as it wants, without any further restraints from United Methodists like me. And the Global Methodist Church will have a chance to address such matters in a different way, which I hope will be less politically partisan, more biblically grounded, and better shaped by the perspectives and experiences of faithful brothers and sisters from around the world.