Demographics

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Look at a United Methodist timeline: Why are conservatives going nuclear with lawsuits?

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Look at a United Methodist timeline: Why are conservatives going nuclear with lawsuits?

The slowly evolving trainwreck that is the disunited United Methodist Church is an unbelievably complicated story and I have lots of sympathy for journalists who are being asked to cover it — week after week — in normal-length news reports.

I have some right to say this, since I have been covering this story since 1984 or earlier.

For starters, there is no one United Methodist Church and there hasn’t been one for decades. See this flashback column that I wrote a few years ago: “Old fault lines can be seen in the ‘seven churches’ of divided Methodism,” which was followed by “Doctrinal debates that define the divided United Methodists.”

The bottom line, once again: This war has always been about biblical authority and a host of other doctrinal clashes, with battles about homosexuality grabbing the headlines.

Anyway, I was reading another update from The Nashville Tennessean the other day — “United Methodists grapple with schism as 300-plus churches leave across U.S.” (high paywall) — and something hit me (other than the fact that “schism” still isn’t an accurate word for what is happening here). The key was looking at several key events on a timeline.

First, let’s plug in a key fact from a recent Religion News Service report about the doctrinally conservative UMC congregations who are trying to hit the denominational exit doors in Western North Carolina and Florida. The lawyers trying to sue the UMC establishment are, you see, are working on a deadline

A lawyer for the Western North Carolina Annual Conference, which has more than 1,000 congregations, responded … saying it would not comply since the request does not follow the disaffiliation plan approved by a special session of the United Methodist Church’s General Conference in 2019.

That plan allows churches to leave the denomination through the end of 2023. They can take their properties with them after paying two years of apportionments and pension liabilities.

Tick, tick, tick.

That 2019 General Conference was, of course, the watershed event in which a coalition of growing Global South churches and some conservative Americans infuriated the shrinking UMC establishment by passing the “Traditional Plan,” while also (#TriggerWarning) urging enforcement of “Book of Discipline” doctrinal stands on marriage and sexuality.


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Some trends in global Anglican Communion are starting to look rather Black and White

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Some trends in global Anglican Communion are starting to look rather Black and White

There was nothing unusual about Nigerian Archbishop Henry Ndukuba leading the 2021 dedication rites for Holy Trinity Cathedral Church, which was packed with Nigerian Anglicans and a dozen or so bishops.

But this historic service was held in Houston and the cathedral is not part of the Diocese of Texas or the U.S. Episcopal Church. Some clergy at this Church of Nigeria North American Mission event were recognized as Anglicans by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Some were not.

This puzzle became more complicated recently during Lambeth 2022, which Nigeria boycotted, along with the churches of Uganda and Rwanda. Other Global South bishops, during Lambeth standoffs with Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby over the status of doctrines on marriage and sex, declined to receive Holy Communion with openly gay and lesbian bishops.

"There is a profound asymmetric quality to the Anglican Communion, where the voice of the bulk of its membership is either absent or muted," said the Rev. David Goodhew of St. Barnabas Church in Middlesborough, England. He is the author of a series of articles about African Anglicanism for Covenant, the weblog of The Living Church, an independent Anglican publication founded in 1878.

"If one adds up the number of bishops who didn't share Holy Communion at Lambeth … that is a very large number," he said. "I have been startled by the number of descriptions that said this Lambeth was a success. I don't know how one makes that claim when it would appear the bulk of the Anglican Communion's bishops couldn't come together to receive Communion. That looks like a disaster."

Bottom line: Global South Anglicans are experiencing a "volcano of growth" and remain "at loggerheads" with the shrinking churches of the United Kingdom, North America and other western nations. While most Global South bishops serve growing flocks -- roughly 75% of active worshipers in the 77-million-member Anglican Communion -- many western bishops lead what Goodhew called "micro-dioceses" with under 1,000 active members or "mini-dioceses" with fewer than 5,000.

The Church of Nigeria, meanwhile, claims 17 million members and the Center for Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, near Boston, estimates active participants at 22 million. The other churches skipping Lambeth 2022 were Uganda, with 10 million members, and Rwanda, with 1 million members.

The Church of England remains Anglicanism's power hub. It has 26 million members, but 2019 weekly attendance was about 679,000 -- before the COVID-19 crisis.


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Is America's religion cup half-empty or half-full? Two new takes on the omnipresent 'nones'

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Is America's religion cup half-empty or half-full? Two new takes on the omnipresent 'nones'

The uber-trend in 21st Century American religion is the increase in “nones” who cite no religious affiliation or identity when pollsters phone. Last December, the Pew Research Center reported that 29% of the adult population currently self-describes as either atheist, agnostic or — by far the biggest category — “nothing in particular” regarding religion.

Thus the media and religious professionals will want to examine two new assessments of the situation.

Religion’s cup looks half-empty, a familiar scenario, in the book “Reorganized Religion: The Reshaping of the American Church and Why It Matters” by Bob Smietana. But the cup is half-full for a team at Baylor University’s top-flight Institute for Studies of Religion, whose findings are summarized in a (paywalled) Wall Street Journal item. For access to the full academic report on "nones" research (Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion, volume 18, article 7), contact the institute at ISR@baylor.edu or 254 -710-2841.

Smietana is a well-positioned veteran guide as a Religion News Service national reporter, formerly with the Nashville Tennessean and Christianity Today magazine. His book is especially useful for journalists new to the religion beat as he surveys this generation’s dire data of decline, mingled with interviews of assorted dropouts and questers.

His over-all theme is that America and Americans depend on what’s called “organized religion,” actual face-to-face gatherings now weakened by both COVID and societal undertow. Organized secularism simply cannot offer a substitute for building and serving communities. Pointed questions are posed by Eboo Patel, the founder of Interfaith America raised Ismaili Muslim, summed up as follows by Smietana.

“What would happen if all the religious and faith-based institutions in your community disappeared? All the churches and schools, the hospitals and medical clinics, homeless shelters and food pantries, all the tutoring programs and benevolence funds. Who would pick up the slack? Who would tutor kids, resettle refugees, run shelters for battered women, and devote themselves to the whole host of charitable activities, large and small, that faith groups do?”

That doesn’t even touch help to individuals that nobody notices or the religious aspect of religion, the inherent need to worship, the sense of wholeness and purpose within a puzzling cosmos that faith can provide, or the resulting emotional and even physical well-being demonstrated in many secular studies.


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Religion-beat crash: RNS wades into intersectional fight between LGBTQ clout and race

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Religion-beat crash: RNS wades into intersectional fight between LGBTQ clout and race

The journalism nightmare begins with an email, a text or, in the old days, a telephone call or a photocopy of a document in the mail.

Sources may or may not demand to remain anonymous. They want your newsroom to dive into a controversy that — in most cases — involves money, sex, power and what violations of religious law, criminal laws or both.

The source has tons of information on one side of a conflict that has two sides, or more. There is no way to write the story without multiple voices speaking — but only one side will talk. Nine times out of 10, there are legitimate issues of confidentiality, often legalities linked to counseling or medical care.

The reporter describes all of this to an editor. It’s clear this story will require untold hours of research (money, in newsroom terms) and, if the story ever pans out, the result will be long and complicated. The editor’s eyes glaze over. The question: Why is this story worth the time, money and effort?

I got one of those calls, long ago, about the sex life and financial times of PTL’s Jim Bakker. Eventually Charlotte Observer editors passed, pulling me off that lead. I left and, years later, a great reporter (see the essential Charles E. Shepard book) pulled the evolving threads together for a Pulitzer.

I cannot imagine how many emails and calls Robert Downen and Houston Chronicle reporters fielded before being allowed to dig into years of sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention. I’m waiting for the book.

All of this is a long introduction to the challenges that, I suspect, loom over this double-decker Religion News Service headline:

Why the largest US Lutheran denomination apologized to a Latino congregation

It’s been a ‘perfect storm’ of charismatic personalities and a heightened awareness of racism, all brewing in one of the country’s whitest denominations

But the story doesn’t open with issues linked to race.

What we see in this unbelievably complicated story is a head-on collision between key elements of postmodern theories about “intersectionality.” Think race, sex, gender, economics and the demographic realities facing the declining world of oldline liberal Protestantism.


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At Lambeth 2022, many Anglican bishops could not 'walk together' to the altar

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At Lambeth 2022, many Anglican bishops could not 'walk together' to the altar

While Canterbury is urging Anglicans to keep "walking together," the 2022 Lambeth Conference demonstrated that many of the Anglican Communion's bishops can no longer even receive the Eucharist together.

Doctrinal conflicts over biblical authority and sexuality have raged for decades, with growing churches in the Global South clashing with the shrinking, but wealthy, churches in England, America and other Western regions. During this 12-day conference, which ended Sunday (August 8), conservatives from Africa, Asia and elsewhere declined to receive Holy Communion with openly gay and lesbian bishops. Several provinces -- including the massive Church of Nigeria -- boycotted Lambeth 2022 altogether.

"For the large majority of the Anglican Communion the traditional understanding of marriage is something that is understood, accepted, and without question, not only by bishops but their entire church," said Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, in a mid-conference address. "To question this teaching is unthinkable, and in many countries would make the church a victim of derision, contempt and even attack."

Bishops in the Anglican minority, he added, "have not arrived lightly at their ideas. … They are not careless about Scripture. They do not reject Christ. But they have come to a different view on sexuality after long prayer, deep study and reflection on understandings of human nature. For them, to question this different teaching is unthinkable."

Throughout Lambeth 2022, the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches -- representing about 75% of Anglican church attendance -- pushed to reaffirm a 1998 Lambeth resolution that "homosexual practice" is "incompatible with Scripture," while also urging Anglicans to "oppose homophobia." It stressed centuries of doctrine that "sexuality is intended by God to find its rightful and full expression between a man and a woman in the covenant of marriage, established by God in creation, and affirmed by our Lord Jesus Christ." That earlier resolution passed with 526 votes in favor, 70 opposed and 45 abstentions.

Writing to Lambeth participants, Welby said the "validity" of that resolution "is not in doubt" and that the "whole resolution is still in existence."

However, the archbishop did not allow a vote on the issue and he said he would not, as requested by Anglican primates in the past, discipline the unorthodox.


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Traditional Latin Mass feud news remains scarce: How reporters can grasp what's at stake

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Traditional Latin Mass feud news remains scarce: How reporters can grasp what's at stake

What’s the deal with all the emotional meltdowns about the traditional Latin Mass? I mean, no one speaks Latin anymore.

It sounds like a line that could have come out of the mouth of comedian Jerry Seinfeld during one of his stand-up acts. It isn’t part of his act, but it is a more than symbolic question that Catholics have been pondering over the past year.

It was last summer when Pope Francis signed a motu proprio — Latin for a papal document personally signed by the pope to signify his special interest in a topic — on this very subject. In the July 16, 2021, decree, the pope approved clarifications regarding restrictions on the traditional Latin Mass in an effort to ensure that liturgical reform is “irreversible” and that bishops strive to enforce changes made after the Second Vatican Council.

Specifically, bishops were told to ban ordinations of priests and confirmations using the old rite. They also were instructed to limit the frequency of rites by priests who have managed to receive a dispensation to celebrate Mass in Latin.

What’s the deal with the traditional Latin Mass? It turns out a lot.

The Novus Ordo Mass, which has been celebrated since 1965, is the norm among Catholic churches in this country and around the globe. Coverage, particularly last year, of the Traditional Latin Mass took on a political twinge in the pages of The New York Times. This is how their story from July 16 of last year framed the debate:

Pope Francis took a significant step toward putting the Roman Catholic Church’s liturgy solidly on the side of modernization on Friday by cracking down on the use of the old Latin Mass, essentially reversing a decision by his conservative predecessor.

The move to restrict the use of an old Latin rite in celebrating Mass dealt a blow to conservatives, who have long complained that the pope is diluting the traditions of the church.

Francis placed new restrictions on where and by whom the traditional Latin Mass can be celebrated and required new permissions from local bishops for its use.

The key words to look for in mainstream news reports are “modernization” and “conservative,” as if this pope was doing something positive and that Pope Benedict XVI had been somehow stuck in the past.


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Podcast: More Americans are losing faith in God, but press should dig for deeper details

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Podcast: More Americans are losing faith in God, but press should dig for deeper details

When looking for commentary on trends in Gallup poll numbers about religion, it never hurts to do a few online searches and look for wisdom from the late George Gallup, Jr.

Reporters should also consider placing a call to John C. Green, a scholar and pollster who has followed trends in religion and politics for decades. Of course, it always helps to collect files of charts from political scientist Ryan Burge, a GetReligion contributor who is an omnipresent force on Twitter (and buy his latest book, “20 Myths about Religion and Politics in America”).

Gallup, Green and Burge (#DUH) played prominent roles in this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in), which focused on a Religion News Service story (via the Washington Post) about a now-familiar trend in America’s public square. That headline: “Poll: Americans’ belief in God is dropping.” The overture:

Belief in God has been one of the strongest, most reliable markers of the persistence of American religiosity over the years. But a new Gallup Poll suggests that may be changing.

In the latest Gallup Poll, belief in God dipped to 81 percent, down six percentage points from 2017, the lowest since Gallup first asked the question in 1944.

This raises an obvious question: Who is losing faith in God?

This news report links the trend to politics (#DUH, again) and makes a very interesting connection, in terms of cause and effect. Read this carefully:

Belief in God is correlated more closely with conservatism in the United States, and as the society’s ideological gap widens, it may be a contributor to growing polarization. The poll found that 72 percent of self-identified Democrats said they believed in God, compared with 92 percent of Republicans (with independents between at 81 percent).

In recent years there has been a rise in the number of Americans who acknowledge being Christian nationalists — those who believe Christian and American identities should be fused.

“It could be that the increase in the number of atheists is a direct result of Christian nationalism,” said Ryan Cragun, a sociologist at the University of Tampa who studies the nonreligious.

I’ll provide some additional details in the rest of the post to back up what I’m about to say. The big idea in this story, interpreting these latest Gallup numbers, appears to be this: Lots of young people in liberal and progressive forms of religion are so upset about the rise in vaguely defined Christian nationalism that they openly declaring that they are atheists and agnostics.

Say what?


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Do trends in Grand Rapids tell us something about religion, evangelicalism and the GOP?

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Do trends in Grand Rapids tell us something about religion, evangelicalism and the GOP?

Tuesday was a good night for Kansas abortion-rights campaigners and for many Republicans blessed by Donald Trump. Democrats are calculating that both factors could foretell a good night for them on Election Day.

Whatever, journalists attuned to the potent though oft-neglected religion factor should especially focus on the Michigan Republican U.S. House primary win by neophyte John Gibbs, a Trump-endorsed 2020 election denier.

In this significant showdown, Gibbs edged incumbent Peter Meijer (pronounced “Meyer”) with 52%. It helps to remember that Trump staged his final campaign rallies in a very symbolic location — Grand Rapids — in 2016 and 2020.

As a brand-new House member, Meijer voted to impeach President Trump for attempting to overthrow President Biden’s Electoral College victory. (Meijer’s predecessor in the seat, Justin Amash, had backed the 2019 Trump impeachment, quit the Republican Party and retired.)

Among last year’s 10 pro-impeachment House Republicans, five others sought party re-nomination. At this writing two of them led Trumpite challengers in Washington state’s Tuesday “jungle primary,” Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dan Newhouse. North Carolina’s Tom Rice lost big, California’s David Valadao won and Liz Cheney faces Wyoming voters August 16. Four decided to retire.

Underscoring hopes to flip the Michigan seat, House Democrats’ campaign arm horrified some party stalwarts by spending $435,000 on ads to boost Gibbs’s name recognition, while undercutting Meijer as the far stronger November opponent. In what turned out to be an obituary, a Monday Meijer blog post denounced Democrats’ “nauseating” violation of “moral limits.”

This brings us to the obvious GetReligion question: Why religion-beat buzz about Michigan District 3?

Simply because it centers on Grand Rapids, as much as any northern town a buckle on an established Bible (especially Calvinist) Belt outside of the South.


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And this just in: The Episcopal Church gets more sobering news from the book of numbers

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And this just in: The Episcopal Church gets more sobering news from the book of numbers

My very first experience with The Episcopal Church (TEC) was on a youth group mission trip to Huntsville, Ala. We were with a group called World Changers, which was an evangelical organization that helped organize free labor from young people for individuals who did not have the ability to pay for home repairs. Some groups were tasked with painting, others were focused on cleaning up yard debris, while my group put a new roof on a house in the Alabama heat.

For reasons I can’t fully recall, our youth group was going to be in Alabama on a Sunday morning and the organizers at World Changers had decided that the teenagers from First Baptist of Salem, Ill., would visit the local Episcopal congregation.

I have to admit — I had absolutely no idea what was going on. I was raised in a very low-church fashion in a Southern Baptist Church. No vestments, no stoles, no creeds, and no communion each Sunday. I remember sitting in the pews and thinking how different it was, and coming to the realization that I didn’t know about any faith tradition outside my own.

I have a lot of affinity for Episcopalians. In fact, my American Baptist Church has latched on to many aspects of the liturgy followed in TEC. We say the creed each Sunday, we read the lectionary, we recite the Lord’s Prayer and we sing the Doxology and the Gloria Patria. I like the rituals that can be found in TEC.

What I also enjoy is that the Episcopalians are really good at data collection.

There’s no denomination that compares to how meticulous they are in collecting annual statistics and making them publicly available. That makes it very easy for me to write a post about what’s going on with Episcopalians. I wrote one such post last year entitled, “The Death of the Episcopal Church is Near.” It has easily become the most popular article on this website over the past 12 months.

I now have data from 2020 and my conclusion hasn’t changed. The Episcopal Church is in serious trouble.

Some of it may be pandemic related, but some of it is clearly not. The end is coming fairly rapidly for the TEC as it exists today. Let me explain.


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