I have been cautioning Americans about this for decades but little did I realize that the canary in the coal mine would turn out to be the United Methodist Church. The shortest statement of the issue that I can come up with is that as society becomes more global it will become more socially conservative.
Let me quickly summarize events for you. In the United States the UMC has been losing members at the rate of about 100,000 per year while in Africa it has been gaining members at an equal rate. With increasing membership has come increasing influence over church policy. Most recently that has taken the form of a rejection of a liberalizing plan at the recent meeting of the denomination’s general conference last month.
Now I’ll turn it over to Methodist layman Mark Tooley, from his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:
The surge in African growth has flummoxed America’s liberal Methodist elites. Ascendant for 100 years, they long assumed their denomination naturally would follow Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Congregationalists and others in liberalizing on sexuality. But every quadrennial conference since 1972 has affirmed sex as permissible only between husband and wife.
Liberals sometimes defy church law when making local personnel decisions. In 2016 United Methodism’s U.S. Western Jurisdiction elected a lesbian bishop married to a woman. The church’s top court ruled her election illegal but claimed to lack the power to remove her. In response to events like this, bishops called last month’s special conference to adjudicate a final church settlement on sexuality.
Most U.S. bishops touted the “One Church Plan,†which would have let local churches choose their own policies on same-sex marriage. This proposal resembled other liberalizing denominations, which have suffered schisms and accelerated membership losses after such moves. The Methodist delegates defeated this measure 55% to 45%.
In its place, by a vote of 53% to 47%, U.S. conservatives joined international representatives to pass the “Traditional Plan.†It enhances enforcement of current church teaching and allows liberal regions and churches to leave with their property if unwilling to abide. But it isn’t that simple: The United Methodist denomination owns its congregations’ buildings. Parts of the new plan, including the exit provision, may have to be refined next year at a conference in Minneapolis.
If we want the sexual, social, political, and economic mores we’ve been cultivating over the last century or so to flourish, it will need to be in a walled garden. Most of the world and particularly the parts of the world that are growing and from which we should expect our immigrants to come for the foreseeable future do not view them as good, right, or the way they think that anybody should live.
A globalized America will more closely resemble the worlds of Islam or conservative Christianity than it does Sweden. Increasingly, Sweden looks a lot less like Sweden.
While I haven’t followed the issue closely, one things stands out to me about the UMC: they have an episcopal governance, that is they are top-down hierarchical. This is in contrast with many American protestant churches, that are either congregational (local church sovereign) or presbyterian (mixed). So, I’m not sure the framing in the linked piece is entirely accurate about how different Protestant denominations have addressed this. Some of them presumably haven’t addressed it all, the individual church chooses its policy and chooses its minister. The UMC has to uniformly decide how local control is to be given.
Hmmm. I can see it getting more conservative but not as a necessary consequence of becoming more global, but because the faiths which go global, particularly those preaching prosperity gospel which is very popular in the third world, are conservative. For faiths like Catholicism, they have blended in and had some success in third world countries by adopting some of their practices, like exorcism. I am not sure if practicing exorcism makes a faith more conservative. More radical I think.
Steve
With reference to exorcism, Christianity has been practicing exorcism at least since the 4th century, long before there was much contact with what are now called “third world countries”. I’m not sure what that has to do with anything.
I have documented at some length how immigrants bring their political, social, etc. views along with them. The Swedish and Norse immigrants brought progressivism, rooted in Scandinavian social doctrine. The Irish brought political machine government which Pat Moynihan characterized as “an Irish village writ large”. The central and eastern Europeans brought the political and social doctrine that were current in the late 19th century. And so on. These views have now persisted for some generations, adding new strains to American political and social practice.
That African and Muslim Middle Eastern immigrants will bring their social, religious, and political views with them is inevitable. The present failure to insist on assimilation will ensure that’s that much more likely.
America has passed the tipping point with gay people, just as it with premarital sex. No matter how many conservative men immigrate to this country, tradition will not be staging a comeback. Traditional gender roles are boring and unsatisfying, and in twenty years, most Christians will have learned ways to explain away those parts of the Bible, and the world will go on. Imagine having a kid who is gay and leaning on the Bible to tell them to either be straight or be celibate. Conservatives don’t loathe their children, do they?
I believe the gospels mention Jesus and the apostles performing excorcism; so it was there from the beginning.
As to cultural mores, it goes without saying America through its soft and hard powers changes other cultures even more.