Liberals Rail AGAINST Vaccine Access for African United Methodist Delegates

Just when you thought knee-jerk “negative partisanship” could not get any worse in the United Methodist Church (UMC), some liberal leaders are demonizing evangelicals for, um, helping non-American General Conference delegates access Covid-19 vaccines.

Some 61 percent of the world has been at least partially vaccinated against Covid-19. But availability has been unequal. I already have written to my U.S. Representative and Senators about this. I would have hoped that there could be more common ground on helping others who want such vaccines but cannot access them.

The repeated delays of the 2020 General Conference have been painful for all sides of the UMC divide.

United Methodists across the spectrum want General Conference to meet soon. This is hardly a “partisan” concern. As a basic matter of good governance, our denomination has urgent administrative needs (related to finances, Judicial Council elections, bishops, and other matters) that cannot be addressed until General Conference meets. Furthermore, the prolonged delays of General Conference have brought much pain for liberal United Methodists. A liberal caucus in my own conference recently lamented that in Indiana alone, there have been “many” LGBTQ individuals who have left United Methodist ministry or the ordination process because of the standards of the UMC Discipline, upon which no moratorium can be legally placed until the General Conference meets and adopts the Protocol.

According to the United Methodist News Service, the Commission on the General Conference in November identified the two primary remaining obstacles to holding General Conference as Covid-19 vaccines and travel visas for non-American delegates. These are interrelated, since the U.S. federal government is barring people from entering the country unless they have been vaccinated. The Commission chair has rightly said that we should not have General Conference with “just U.S. delegates.”

It should not be controversial to want to let the repeatedly delayed General Conference happen with equity. But there is an ugly, still-ongoing history of our denominational bureaucracy failing to do all that it could to help African delegates secure visas to attend General Conference, effectively resulting in massive “voter suppression” of our denomination’s largest and fastest-growing region (home to most black United Methodists). At the 2019 General Conference as many as 31 African delegate seats remained unfilled!

Helping United Methodist General Conference delegates access vaccines is NOT an inherently “partisan” idea. It has been publicly reported that last June, liberal Bishop Ken Carter of Florida and Western North Carolina “stated that he supported efforts to get the non-U.S. delegates vaccinated” in order to help General Conference meet and settle our denomination separation, “because people were ready to move on and have their futures more certain.” In August, liberal Western Jurisdiction leader Anthony Tang (with whom I previously clashed over his unsuccessful attempt to get part of the Traditional Plan invalidated) indicated his support for our denomination providing Covid-19 vaccine access for all General Conference delegates around the world.

As recently as November, liberal New York Bishop Thomas Bickerton declared, “we should be working tirelessly for getting as many people there as is possible”—which means, among other things, securing access to required vaccines for as many delegates as possible from the United Methodism’s central conferences outside of America.

United Methodist leaders in Africa, including at least one African bishop and multiple African delegates, approached fellow United Methodists in the Wesleyan Covenant Association (WCA), seeking help for their regions’ delegates vaccination against Covid-19 and thus meeting U.S. government requirements to enter the United States to be present for General Conference.

As a result of these consultations, initiated by African United Methodist leaders, the WCA first approached the Council of Bishops and other parts of our denomination’s massive bureaucracy to see if they would be willing to help with this expressed need of some United Methodist delegates for vaccines. It turned out that our apportionment-funded bureaucracy had no plans to do so.

Even though the apportionment-funded bureaucracy could have easily met this need by spending less than one-twentieth of one percent of their collective unrestricted, unfixed reserves and other net assets.

Then the WCA invited unofficial caucuses across the theological spectrum, including self-described liberationists, progressives, and centrists, to help fellow United Methodist delegates in need access the vaccines they want and make General Conference work. So far, IRD/UMAction and other evangelical caucuses have accepted this invitation to help, while more liberal caucuses either declined or did not respond.

For many non-U.S. United Methodist delegates, receiving a Covid-19 vaccine requires extensive travel for they cannot be fairly or realistically expected to pay. This campaign provides the funds needed to help delegates access the vaccines they want.

But the WCA has been very clear that this support is “being made available to all delegates in need without regard to where they might stand on any legislation pending before General Conference.”

This is a basic matter of fairness, equity, and good governance.

Now there has been an apparently coordinated effort of liberal caucus figures and liberal bishops (it’s hard to tell the difference nowadays) oddly denouncing bringing vaccine equity for non-American delegates. First the LGBTQ liberationist Reconciling Ministries Network (RMN) publicly disparaged this effort, declaring that it “will not participate in or endorse any effort” focused on helping non-American United Methodist General Conference delegates access vaccines. This was quickly followed by similar denunciation from Cynthia Astle’s often stridently liberal UM Insight website.

Then within a mere two-day span (January 18-19) came a press release from three bishops, another press release from the executive committee of the Council of Bishops, and an extended denunciation from the liberal “Love Your Neighbor” caucus coalition, all echoing similar talking points, amplified in an extremely slanted, misleading UMNS article.

The release of these four statements and articles singing the same tune, within just a day of each other, sure looks like the result of intentional cooperation.

Good News magazine has a detailed, point-by-point refutation of their key overlapping arguments.

But the bottom line is that these critiques don’t make sense. Much of it boils down to denouncing the vaccine-access initiative United Methodist delegates in need, with evangelical caucus’s limited resources, as “inequitable” because it does not spend more money to help vaccinate more people. (Perhaps the initiative could vaccinate more people if any of these critics had contributed a dime to it.)

Here’s how one longtime liberal leader in the Western Jurisdiction (who went out of his way to legally defend the legitimacy of lesbian activist Karen Oliveto’s election as bishop) has responded to this “firestorm of controversy”:

“To some degree this strikes me as fundamentally an assertion that if the WCA can’t solve the whole problem of COVID-19, then it ought not attempt to solve one piece of the problem that COVID-19 has in turn caused. …

If the only ministry that is not colonial or patronizing or paternalistic is the ministry that addresses any problem in a holistic manner, then we’d all have to be politicians serving in legislatures, executive branches of government, or the court systems, because all the rest of us work on problems in parts and pieces. And I can tell you for sure, I don’t want to be part of a society where we all work for the government. I think the WCA is getting a bit of a bum rap on this thing.” (emphasis added)

Some critics have promoted efforts to more indiscriminately spread vaccine access, which is wonderful. I also support that. But any donation to such larger efforts is unlikely to directly help any United Methodist delegates. So when the critics needlessly frame such broader efforts as completely replacing focused help for delegates (as if the two are mutually exclusive), the critics are effectively saying that, of all remaining people who want but have been unable to access vaccines, they would rather help anyone else in the world other than less privileged fellow United Methodist leaders.

Most of these same critics presumably chose vaccination months ago, likely thinking of the research indicating how this may potentially save them from severe sickness and death. After gladly taking a spot near relatively near the front of the global line, how can you actually oppose “any effort” to offer the same protection to your denominational counterparts from places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Tanzania?

In seeking donations designated for “Delegate Visas and Vaccines” for non-American delegates in need, I have been clear that helping these United Methodist brothers and sisters access vaccines they want is good in and of itself, and that it would also be good to let General Conference meet this year to get our denomination unstuck. Both are valuable.

Any single donation of $50 or even $10,000 to any vaccine-aid campaign, whether given to help United Methodist delegates or others, is a relatively small drop in the bucket of global vaccine inequity (though every bit helps). With limited resources, prioritizing your personal donations to help leaders of your church with more travel obligations than others reflects Galatians 6:10 and the Methodist General Rules.

The statement from the “Love Your Neighbor” folk also included the very demonstrable false characterization of the Protocol separation treaty as somehow “the WCA’s financially beneficial schism from The United Methodist Church.” I suppose it is possible that they just got their grammar confused and actually meant to acknowledge how financially beneficial the Protocol is for liberals.

Much has been made of the anti-WCA statement from three of the most liberal central-conference bishops: Harald Rückert of Germany, Rudy Juan of the southern Philippines, and Eben Nhiwatiwa of Zimbabwe. Some have falsely suggested that these three individuals represent all of non-American United Methodism. This statement was almost immediately “endorse[d]” by the Council of Bishops executive committee. Note that the current six officers of the Council of Bishops do not include a single non-American or single non-liberal.

Contrary to what UMNS and the Council of Bishops leadership suggest, not all areas outside of America are the same. Every non-American UMNS chose to interview and quote for its article is from a country where delegates had already been able to access vaccines before this initiative. As for the contexts of the three oft-cited bishops, Germany is a rich Western country, the majority of the entire Filipino population is already fully vaccinated, and I was told that by last May, all delegates in Zimbabwe (which has one of the higher vaccination rates in Sub-Saharan Africa) were already vaccinated.

The evangelical-led effort is focused upon very different contexts, where United Methodist delegates need help accessing the vaccines they want. Treating the three bishops’ statement as discrediting delegate-vaccination aid is as logical as saying people on vulnerable islands should not have tsunami insurance if people in land-locked Kansas are not interested.

The two groups of bishops also make the bizarre accusation that in pursuing this effort, WCA failed to take “some modest time to consult with the church leaders in the Central Conferences.”

To be clear, these bishops are effectively bearing false witness.

Again, this effort began with the initiative of African United Methodist leaders, and this partnership involves ongoing consultations between American and non-American partners.

Why should what an African bishop wants in order to help people in his own area be over-ridden by the hostility of a white bishop in Germany?

Speaking of colonialism, in a must-read response to such strident attacks on this vaccine-access initiative, including the accusation that this effort is somehow “colonialist” (first made by the U.S.-based RMN), three non-American United Methodist leaders (in Africa, Europe, and the Philippines) counter:

…some of our bishops need a refresher on the definition of colonialism. Here is just one standard definition: “The policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.” It should be obvious to anyone that the WCA’s vaccination initiative has none of the “marks of colonialism.” Far from exercising “full or partial political control” over anyone, the WCA’s initiative empowers delegates to fully participate in the General Conference so they can represent their annual conferences.

…

Frankly, given the state of the UM Church, we are surprised and disappointed our bishops and institutional leaders have not done more themselves to see that all delegates are vaccinated so they can attend the General Conference.

…we are very grateful the WCA and its partners are showing the initiative to remove obstacles that could keep some central conferences’ delegates from participating in the General Conference. We hope their initiative is a great success.

In its article, the UMNS chose to extensively amplify accusations of “colonialism” against this vaccine-access initiative for United Methodist delegates in need, but chose to not quote WCA President Keith Boyette’s direct response (sent to UMNS) to such accusations. Furthermore, UMNS touted the alleged “appearance of perceived or real influence of the vote of General Conference delegates” but chose to omit directly mentioning the key detail of how we have been clear from the beginning that vaccine-access support is being offered to all delegates in need who ask, without regard to how they might vote on any issue. (If liberals refuse to join in helping these delegates to make the effort seem more “bipartisan,” how is that evangelicals’ fault?)

This is not the sort of responsible, accurate journalism we should expect from an apportionment-funded outlet that is supposed to serve the whole church.

This continues the American-dominated United Methodist bureaucracy’s ongoing history of refusing to invest sufficient funds to help African delegates fully participate.

This also continues an ongoing trajectory of hateful hostility against non-American General Conference delegates because of how the vast majority (but not all) tend to be theologically traditionalist. Liberal American caucuses, bishops, and congregations have already used their superior wealth as a weapon to try to punish or coerce how poorer non-American regions’ General Conference delegates vote. Some liberal American bishops have displayed extreme racial arrogance and their own form of white nationalism in disrespecting non-American delegates. When some of these region’s leaders begged for helping their delegates to access potentially life-saving vaccines, several liberal American leaders refused to help them, and even indicated that they would rather help secure vaccine access for anyone else on Earth other than the already much-hated non-American General Conference delegates in need.

And now privileged liberal bishops and caucus activists are even demonizing and seeking to dissuade those of us responding to African delegates’ pleas for help with vaccine access!

All of this shows why United Methodist unity is impossible.

If this is how much strident anti-traditionalist animosity these United Methodist leaders are willing to show now, it makes clear that we cannot trust them to respect any traditionalists who, after the split, choose the post-separation United Methodist Church rather than the Global Methodist Church.
UPDATE: At the time this article was first written, the six officers of the Council of Bishops mentioned above were Bishop Cynthia Fierro Harvey of Louisiana (President), Bishop Thomas Bickerton of New York (President Designate), Bishop Tracy Smith Malone (Secretary), Bishop Kenneth Carter of Florida and Western North Carolina (Immediate Past President), Bishop Bruce Ough (Executive Secretary), and Bishop Sally Dyck (Ecumenical Officer).