A brilliant professor, R. Marie Griffith, who heads up the Danforth Center for Religion and Politics and teaches at Washington University in St. Louis, has written a landmark work titled Moral Combat. The subtitle describes its contents: How Sex Divided American Christians & Fractured American Politics.
I wish it were possible to make Dr. Griffith’s book required reading for the leadership of our denomination during the months leading up to next year’s General Conference. It is a book that every bishop, every delegate, and everyone who reads, and thinks, and cares about the future of our church should read. Moral Combat tells the story of how sexual issues have played a major role in the social and intellectual history of our nation since the late 19th century women’s suffrage movement up to and including the current battles over homosexuality and same-sex marriage. A careful and thorough analysis of the conflict with reactionary forces at work in this transition are aptly described by Dr. Griffith as a century of Moral Combat.
George Marsden of United Methodist-related Duke University has been an established authority on reactive forces in the churches since his seminal work on Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925. Dr. Marsden identifies this combative spirit of the conservative reaction as the identifying strain in the movement throughout its history. In describing the mood and manner of the movement, Dr. Marsden cites an old familiar quotation from Curtis Lee Laws in The Watchman-Examiner defining “fundamentalism” as those ready “to do battle royal for the Fundamentals” [ofChristian faith].
Dr. Marsden has written more extensively on this subject in a more recent work titled, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism: “A FUNDAMENTALIST,” he says,
. . .is an EVANGELICAL who is angry about something. . . . .A more precise statement of the same point is that an American Fundamentalist is an evangelical who is militant in opposition to liberal theology in the churches or to changes in cultural values or mores, such as those associated with “secular humanism.” In either the long or the short definitions, fundamentalists are a subtype of evangelical and militancy is crucial to their outlook. (pg. 1)
I was reminded of some of these historical reflections while watching and listening to a video of the Rev. Rob Renfroe, president of Good News, an unofficial caucus of conservative United Methodists, calling for “war in St. Louis” in response to the Bishops recommendation for a Way Forward,.
Dr. James Heidinger, a former leader of Good News, frequently quoted a phrase he accredited to John Calvin: “Peace is not the norm, the battle is.” While using this dubious quotation in an address before the conservative Presbyterian Coalition in November 2005, Dr. Heidinger exhorted the coalition not to grow weary in the battle for truth for, as he saw it, that is the role of the leadership of the church in our time. The “Battle,” more than the “Good News” has become the major motif of this skewed movement that set out to “reform” the church.
One of the leaders of the Wesleyan Covenant Association recently remarked to me about his surprise when attending one of the listening sessions designed to introduce the recommendations to come before the General Conference in St. Louis next February. The laypeople with whom he was in dialogue seemed to have very little knowledge of the impending conflict. He was dismayed by the fact that the laity with whom he was engaged seemed relatively unconcerned. (They “didn’t have a dog in this fight.”) This from a fellow who prides himself in “being on the top of things.” He was a delegate to the last General Conference.
I was not surprised at any of this. I have attended and been a part, one way or another, of every General Conference since the 1968 merger. Early on and for a long time now I have felt that many people get so caught up in general church or “connectional” stuff that they lose touch with “where it’s at.” The besetting sin for Methodists at this esoteric level is a perverse turning of John Wesley’s “going on to perfection” into a legislative process.
Once when we were in one of the many dialogue sessions concerning the conflict over Homosexuality in our denomination, Bishop Woodie White quietly remarked to me, “Our people are way ahead of us on this.” His observation was a calm gem of wisdom, typical of Woodie. that cut through all the smoke and the din of battle.
The folks in our local churches are not much into this high-level fight. Most of our members have people in their families and circles of friends who are gay and whose sober, upright lifestyles do not fit into others’ stereotypes of LGBTQ people as moral degenerates. Rank-and-file United Methodists have become accustomed to accepting people who differ with them in a variety of ways. The bonds of love and grace prevail among their families, friends, neighbors, and congregations. Church isn’t where they go to fight. All this stuff about biblical inerrancy and secular humanism is peripheral to their lives and concerns.
For a hundred years after Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, et al, all of Europe was caught up in a struggle over creeds and confessions. If the religion of the prince was to be the religion of the people, whose religion was the true one? These are the “wars and rumors of wars” that we know as The Hundred Years War. They were fought, not by the princes or the theologians, but by the common folks.
The sons of serfs and servant classes were pressed into the battle. Some of them were casualties for theological abstractions they did not comprehend. Not so much impressed with the polemical preaching of Lutheran and Reformed pastors, the ordinary people grew weary of war. Borrowing on Dr. Griffith’s imagery, you could say there was an epidemic of “moral combat” fatigue.
This cultural milieu was the context for the rise of German Pietism, a movement that saw true religion as a matter of the heart. It was a healing force that brought forgiveness and reconciliation between enemies and among families, friends, and neighbors. German Pietism gave birth to a new religious vitality on the European continent that infiltrated confessional structures as like-minded Christians found each other in small groups that ultimately transcended established order. Soon the movement crossed the English Channel and then the Atlantic, spawned the modern missionary movement, and flourished for a century on the frontier of the New World.
In England the movement found one of its greatest leaders in an Anglican priest who came to believe that the whole of religion was about “The Love of God being Shed abroad in our hearts.” John Wesley’s message of abundant grace affirmed a way of life that said “If your heart is right with my heart, then give me your hand.” Wesley’s movement was not about winning, it was about healing. Social historians today credit Methodism with helping England avoid the kind of bloody revolution that convulsed France.
Perhaps we should all be praying for another epidemic of “moral combat” fatigue.
Retired Bishop William B. Lewis served the Dakotas Area of The United Methodist Church from 1988 to 1996.