Change Comes to Traditional Churches in the 21st Century

In a land where traditional churches have seen a decline in membership, introspection has brought about change.   As has been seen in other churches, the United Methodist Church has begun its trek on a new path, which will seemingly divide the old with the new.   It is a difficult but necessary evolution.

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May 14, 2024 View in browser  Good morning! Today, senior fact-checker for the Today, Explained podcast Laura Bullard is here to talk about what a recent schism among America's Methodists can tell us about the broader country's divisions. —Caroline Houck, senior editor of news Jessica Rinaldi/Boston Globe via Getty Images The Methodist split Last week, hundreds of United Methodist Church (UMC) delegates from around the world sat down to vote on whether or not to reverse a longstanding ban on the ordination of LGBTQ clergy. The decision would also determine whether or not to strike a rule that prohibited clergy from presiding over "homosexual unions."    The room was uncharacteristically hushed as delegates logged their votes. They'd gathered to participate in a quadrennial General Conference, where an elected group of clergy and laypeople review and edit the rules and social stances of the church on a variety of subjects. When the results were announced, the room erupted in loud sobs and cheering.   With this vote — and several others — over 50 years of church law, doctrine, and social stances aimed at restricting the full inclusion of LGBTQ methodists were reversed.     Church historian Ashley Boggan told Today, Explained's Noel King that the UMC's schism should matter to Methodists and non-Methodists alike. "If you look at Methodist history within the United States, it's a great lens for looking at American history," she said.  How did we get here?  For the last five years, the United Methodist Church has been fighting over its stance on LGBTQ members.   In a one-off special session in 2019, the UMC had voted to tighten its prohibitions on LGBTQ members — a decision that nearly half of all UMC congregations across the country went on to publicly reject in the following years. So, in 2022, a splinter denomination was born: the Global Methodist Church. Traditionalist congregations had seen the writing on the wall: Change was coming, and they didn't want to be part of it.    Conservative churches began leaving the denomination in droves, and by the time the General Conference convened this year, a quarter of US congregations had jumped ship. It was this newly slimmed-down UMC that voted to reverse the church's anti-LGBTQ positions earlier this month. Jessica Rinaldi/Boston Globe via Getty Images What Methodists say about America The Methodist church developed in tandem with the United States. Both are 18th-century experiments in democracy, and each has weathered the great challenges of the last two centuries — war, reunion, and an ever-expanding understanding of personhood — in distinct but parallel lanes.     Throughout the 19th century, as the United States grappled with the notion of Black personhood and the reality of chattel slavery, so too did the Methodists. In 1844, 40 percent of Methodist congregations split off to form a pro-slavery splinter congregation.    That was the last time this many Methodists split off from the main denomination. Fifteen years later, the Confederacy seceded as well, and a bloody civil war shortly followed. This parallel has not gone unnoticed.    According to Boggan, in the decades that followed, this pattern repeated itself. As the post-war US reconstructed itself, the Methodist church followed suit. In a 1939 merger, the Southern and Northern Methodists were once again united. As states enacted Jim Crow laws across the country, the Methodists created a segregated system of their own.    The Methodist church became a sort of bellwether for larger national sentiment, and this extended beyond racial politics, The church granted full ordination rights to women in 1956, and seven years later, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique mainstreamed "the problem with no name."    While this all might lead us to fear that the current breakup in the Methodist church is yet again a harbinger of violence, it is helpful to remember this caveat: the Civil War-era United States was extremely Methodist. According to church historian Nathan Hatch, in the runup to the Civil War, the Methodist church was "the most extensive national institution other than the Federal government." The sheer size of the denomination meant that the political reality of the church would eventually become the political reality of the country.    Today, church membership is in decline, and the institutional influence of mainline protestant churches is much diminished (although to exactly what effect is debatable). The church is not, as it was in the 19th century, a small-scale model of the country. Today, according to Boggan, the church acts more like a lens: a way to see broader national tensions work themselves out on a smaller scale. Joe Raedle/Getty Images What next?

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