A complaint filed against United Methodist layman Jeff Sessions, the U.S. Attorney General, has been summarily dismissed by the Alabama-West Florida Conference where his home church is located.
One of the 600 complainants posted this photo on Facebook.
Sessions Complaint Dismissed
One of the 600 signers of a church complaint against U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a United Methodist, posted this letter on Facebook Aug. 3, 2018. (Photo Courtesy of Karin Hromada Delaney)
The letter is signed by the Rev. Dr. Debora Bishop, superintendent of the Mobile District in which Mr. Sessions' home church, Ashland Place United Methodist Church in Mobile, is located. Mr. Sessions also worships at Clarendon United Methodist Church in Alexandria, Va., where the complaint was also directed.
United Methodists lit up social media with negative reactions to the announcement. Several cited what one identified as "the Nuremberg Defense," i.e., the defense used by Nazi war criminals that they were "just following orders" in sending some 13 million people, including 6 million Jews, to their deaths in World War II concentration camps. Click here to read some Facebook reactions.
A group of some 640 United Methodist laity and clergy filed a complaint June 18 alleging that Mr. Sessions had violated Book of Discipline Paragraph 2702.3 for enforcing a "zero tolerance" immigration policy that has separated more than 2,000 immigrant children from their families.
Specifically, the group accused him of child abuse in reference to separating young children from their parents and holding them in mass incarceration facilities; immorality; racial discrimination and “dissemination of doctrines contrary to the established standards of doctrines” of The United Methodist Church.
The complaint's organizer, the Rev. David Wright, a Pacific Northwest Conference elder and chaplain at the University of Puget Sound in Washington State, previously said that the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy as enforced by Sessions, combined with Sessions’ use of Romans 13 to justify the policy, led him and others to conclude that more than a statement of protest was needed.
In an Aug. 3 Facebook post, Rev. Wright wrote:
"If/when I receive such a letter, I look forward to sharing it publicly and observing that the decision renders any claim to moral authority by the church moot. We are choosing not to intervene with child abuse because it is 'political' – and this is a conscious decision of regional and pastoral leadership rather than an act of ignorance or omission.
"Way to cover your ass, #UMC."
The complaint arose after an article by the Rev. Susan Henry-Crowe, top executive of the General Board of Church and Society, calling Mr. Sessions' biblical defense of zero tolerance a "shocking" misuse of scripture. In addition, the Council of Bishops called on the Trump Administration to halt the separation of immigrant families. Many United Methodists were among the faith-based organizations that pressed the Trump Administration to halt the family separation policy, which was suspended in mid-June.
Ordered by federal court to reunite immigrant families, the government says that several hundred children remain separated from their parents and other relatives. Because some undocumented immigrants have already been deported, child welfare advocates say they fear the separated families may never be reunited. Child health experts say that the separated children, even when returned to their parents, are likely to suffer long-term trauma from their incarceration.
Cynthia B. Astle serves as Editor of United Methodist Insight, which she founded in 2011.