Fearful Times

Fear seems to fill the air these days. But that fear is seldom centered on the effects of climate change that have already begun ravaging our planet. Rather it is focused on the fact that our world and familiar institutions are now being shaped by people who are different than we are. 

When the World Economic Forum published its Global Risks Report this month, environmental issues related to climate change filled the top five spots. We are in a crisis that threatens life itself, and we have a narrow window in which to take meaningful action. Yet politicians are too afraid of how voters will respond in the next election cycle to take such steps.

US President Donald Trump stokes fear every chance he gets, and he is both the product and prompter of the most partisan era in recent memory. As the impeachment process ends this week with his almost certain acquittal, it has reflected the extreme partisanship that shapes American politics. Democrats feared reprisal from voters if they did not impeach this polarizing president, and Republicans feared the same if they did. 

The Republican party, including most evangelical Christians, have solidified behind a man who is widely viewed as being immoral, impulsive, and infantile. They have done so because he promised to “make America great again” by restoring the white Protestant Christian dominance that marked America’s past.

Travel bans on Muslim countries, a southern border wall, and highly restrictive immigration policies are all aimed at keeping out those who are racially, ethnically, and religiously different, and who are portrayed as a threat to the country, although few pose any real danger to us. While Republicans support this fear-based agenda, the EPA has been steadily rolling back decades of environmental regulations, hastening the very real and significant dangers facing our planet.

The same partisanship we see in US politics may divide the United Methodist Church (UMC), because of its fixation on homosexuality. Traditionalists are threatened by the changes to family and church structures that same-sex marriage and the ordination of LGBTQ persons represent, and by their growing acceptance within US society. Instead of the “America-first” stance we see in national politics, though, UM traditionalists have reached outside the US and allied with church membership in countries with more conservative sexual norms. Increasing UMC membership in those countries has allowed traditionalists to control church policy, even as their viewpoint becomes more marginalized in the US. It now seems likely that those fears will drive a church schism.

What is under threat is the unquestioned hold that white, heterosexual men have had on the church, and that white male Christians have had on this country. For people of that demographic and those comfortable with that group’s dominance, these are indeed scary times. But neither fear-mongering nor repressive policies will change the demographic shift we are experiencing. 

Darryl Stephens explores this idea in his talk “United Methodism at the End of White Christian America.” ¹ Stephens draws on Robert P. Jones’s book The End of White Christian America to describe the decline of white Protestant Christian dominance in US society, and the division of that group into neo-evangelical and modernist factions that have responded differently to social change. The end of white Christian America has meant a shift in the balance of power within the UMC, as the US has been eclipsed by growing membership overseas. However, General Conference has failed the church by ignoring its global challenges and remaining a US-centric body.

Stephens notes that human sexuality has been the site of contest for control of both the church and the country. He states that “heterosexism fits within a larger context of oppressive mindsets rooted in White, patriarchal, imperialistic privilege.” Structural changes will not resolve the problems facing the church anymore than segregation – or desegregation – resolved racism.

My own research has looked at American Methodism’s history of racism and sexism, and the lessons those struggles hold for the church’s current stalemate. Sadly, I conclude that real change only occurs after older generations, where resistance is centered, die off. Differences over slavery split the church in 1844, and structural segregation did not end until 1968.² Women petitioned to be ordained in 1880 but were not granted full clergy rights until 1956.

But the surge in support for Trump and the traditionalist success in the UMC may well indicate the last gasp of white patriarchal dominance. Robert P. Jones wrote in The Atlantic in 2017 that Trump’s victory is “better understood as the death rattle of White Christian America . . . rather than as its resuscitation.” He notes that white Christian voters turned out in record numbers in 2016, convinced by Trump that the election was the “last chance to stop America’s decline.”

Fear has triumphed in the short term, and the effects of Trump’s judicial appointments and environmental policies will be felt for decades, as will any restructuring of the UMC. At a time when we should be forming alliances and coalitions to address the threat of global climate change, we are building walls of separation, literally and rhetorically. 

However, a more diverse generation is coming of age. We see their influence already in Greta Thunberg’s passionate cries for climate action. We see it in Emma Gonzalez’s demand for substantive steps to curb gun violence. We see it in the election to Congress of Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all progressive, non-white women, two of whom are Muslim. It is no surprise that Trump has branded them “the Squad” and now portrays them as a danger to the country.

We see the mark of this generation as well in the young people who, unlike so many of their peers, have not left the UMC, but call for it to be inclusive of all God’s people. We see it in the group of young people who stood together at General Conference 2019 and read a statement calling for church unity, which had garnered 15,529 signatures overnight. We see it in the impassioned speech made at the same conference by J. J. Warren, a gay college student who told how he and others were spreading an inclusive Gospel on their campus.

In their hands, the future of the church and the nation looks just as bright to many of us as it is fearful to others.

1. Stephens’s talk is one of many excellent presentations from the United Methodist Scholars for an Inclusive Church gathering in August 2019, all of which can be viewed online.
2. Racial division actually goes back to 1787 when black Methodists left the Methodist Episcopal Church to form the Free African Society, later the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the first of three black Methodist denominations that remain independent.