Facing the Empire Within

Commentary

by

Perspectives

Ethics Considered | January 20, 2025

The United States of America has inaugurated the reign of a president who said he would not rule out the use of military force to seize control of the Panama Canal and Greenland. Such international aggression would be a blatant attempt to expand the not-so-hidden empire of the USA. To my fellow United Methodists in the USA: Do not retreat in resignation! We must face the empire within.

Empire assumes many guises. The 2024 Social Principles of the UMC defines Donald Trump’s threat as colonialism: “the practice of establishing full or partial control of other countries, tribes, and peoples through conquest and exploitation.” Empire can also be conducted through neocolonialism, exercised through economic, political, and social control of other peoples. More expansively, empire refers to any coercive power that controls people’s lives—often without their realizing it.

The United Methodist Church (UMC) and its predecessor institutions have a long history of supporting and building empire. The UMC was born of a state church, the head of which controlled the largest world empire at the time. When the US colonies won political independence from the British crown, Methodism in the US also became independent of John Wesley and the Church of England. US Methodism, however, retained the structures and attitudes of empire.

White US Methodists, in particular, have a lot to reckon with. We exercised empire through chattel slavery, forced relocation of indigenous peoples, and missionary expansion. Methodists defended these practices with biblical proof-texts and theological arguments, claiming their actions to be God’s will. Indigenous boarding schools, for example, were cast as education and Christianization. Jim Crow laws were depicted as maintaining public order. Methodists justified their participation in projects of empire through powerful rhetoric and jurisprudence, such as Manifest Destiny and the Doctrine of Discovery.

Today, Trump’s territorial aspirations mirror in some ways the UMC’s decades-long agenda to become a “global church.” Both efforts involve structures of empire, with control residing in the United States. The UMC’s central conferences, for example, are directly modeled after the Church of England’s structure from 1867—during the height of Western colonialism. Regarding Anglican churches overseas, the Church of England sought “the binding of the Churches of our colonial empire and the missionary Churches beyond them in the closest union with the Mother-Church.” The US-based UMC has been slow to dismantle this inherited form of empire, making its largest overseas acquisition in 2008 (a relationship that unraveled in 2024).

Facing “the empire within” requires a long process of repentance. For example, the UMC began facing up to its past mistreatment of Native Americans in 1988. General Conference confessed the church’s sin and offered a formal apology in 1992, supported restitution to some tribes in 1996, offered an act or repentance in 2012, and published an in-depth report of Methodist involvement in the Sand Creek massacre in 2016. The work of repentance continues. In 2000, General Conference adopted an Act of Repentance for Racism—and the work is not done. Repentance involves confessing sin, ceasing wrongdoing, turning from old patterns of behavior, and intending to do better. Repentance also requires restitution and active resistance to further harm.

If only we could face down empire with a quick apology and a simple vote! Neither is sufficient, and yet both are important steps. In 2025, annual conferences in the UMC have the opportunity to vote on several constitutional amendments that address the harms of empire.

  • Proposed is adding the words “gender” and “ability” as protected categories to Paragraph 4, Article 4, which proclaims the “inclusiveness of the church.” Behind this proposal is the awareness that Methodism has a long history of discrimination against persons because of gender and physical and mental (dis)abilities.
  • Proposed is a revision of Article V, “Racial Justice.” Through this amendment, United Methodists must decide if “The United Methodist Church commits to confronting and eliminating all forms of racism, racial inequity, colonialism, white privilege and white supremacy, in every facet of its life and in society at large.” An affirmative vote would be a significant step toward dismantling these forms of empire.
  • The most complex package of constitutional amendments addresses the most complex form of empire with the UMC: the role and power of the United States. The “regionalization legislation” proposes decentering US conferences by putting them on equal legislative footing with conferences around the world. No longer would the denomination’s General Conference be dominated by legislation pertaining only to the United States.

While I am in favor of the above constitutional amendments, I know that they will not solve the problem of empire. To face the empire within, we must reckon with our past, repair relationships, and create more just structures for all. The project of decolonizing church and society requires collaboration in material projects of shared concern through which we can craft new narratives of solidarity and belonging. We cannot achieve this goal by serving “the needy” from our position of perceived privilege. Rather, we must roll up our sleeves and get to work alongside each other as equals in the kin-dom of God.

If you, your reading group, or congregation is invested in facing the empire within, consider reading together the following books:

Stephens, Darryl W. Reckoning Methodism: Mission and Division in the Public Church. Cascade, 2024.

Scott, David W., and Filipe Maia, eds. Methodism and American Empire: Reflections on Decolonizing the Church. Abingdon, 2023.

The Rev. Dr. Darryl W. Stephens, a United Methodist ordained deacon, Director of United Methodist Studies at Lancaster Theological Seminary and is author of many books, articles, and chapters on Methodism, including Methodist Morals: Social Principles in the Public Church’s Witness(2016) and Reckoning Methodism: Mission and Division in the Public Church (2024). This post is republished with permission from his blog, Ethics Considered.