The Holy Kiss
“Hi. My name is Roger, and I’m a progressive Christian.”
Apparently, those are fightin’ words that necessarily lead to estrangement, inquisition, and scapegoating when heard by evangelical Christians. Evangelicalism became the mainstream form of Christianity in the U.S. starting in the 1980s and they’ve rather enjoyed their time in the Sun – and aren’t at all happy to be losing their transient and fleeting clout and status.
I’ve been in ministry serving as a pastor in the United Methodist Church since 1996. The UMC is a non-creedal, “big tent church” that includes a wide range of theological and political beliefs. At our best, we meet a real need in our increasingly polarized society by not being one of those churches where you can predict how everyone votes as they are echo chambers of people who all think the same. At our best, we heed John Wesley’s admonition to “think and let think” and embrace the adage “though we may not all think alike, may we not love alike?” and we roll up our sleeves together to do much good in a world that needs it. However, since legislative language was imposed into our Book of Discipline in 1972 that discriminates against homosexual persons (officially opposed to ordaining out gay clergy and prohibits all clergy from conducting same sex weddings) the UMC has been more divided than united. If only the delegates from the U.S. were counted at the recent General Conferences where it came up for a vote, we’d already have removed that discriminatory language years ago. And, while many regions of the UMC in parts of the U.S. have been ordaining LGBTQ clergy for years, as well as allowing clergy to marry same-sex couples – heck, there’s even a married lesbian serving as a bishop in one of the largest annual conferences – the truth is that many UMs, especially in the southern states, have been fighting against this tooth and nail. In the past year, a new denomination called the “Global Methodist Church” has been created and hundreds of UM clergy and congregations are in the process of disaffiliating from the UMC – with most of them joining the GMC. For example, I understand some 50-90% of the UM congregations in various parts of Texas are disaffiliating.
Speaking of Texas… I’ve long been an advocate of helping the Church I love to grow and evolve in their love and shift to fully including and embracing LGBTQI+ persons. Resisting these efforts to shed and repent from institutional homophobia has been the chief matter and concern of the conservatives (frankly, conservative evangelicals) within my denomination. Granted, they occasionally gave lip-service to other topics. I recall their feathers being ruffled about encouraging increased inclusion of feminine images of God back in the early 1990s; i.e., their outrage at the Reimagining Conference -aka “The Sophia Conference.” I entered the fray more formally upon the release of my book Kissing Fish (2011) and started blogging for Elephant Journal, Huffington Post, and Patheos (on their Progressive Christian portal). In 2018 seven UM clergypersons, all from Texas, filed charges against me – without even talking to me first (disregarding Jesus’s direct teachings) – and I’ve never even lived in Texas. It was a blog that I wrote calling for a mature Christian understanding of sexuality that was the last straw for them. Let’s be clear. It was sex that triggered them. It always does. Sigh. The charges were eventually dismissed and the conservatives were left brooding. Their brooding eventually led to an attempt to push out the progressives in the denomination, but then reality hit. They realized that the majority of members of the UMC in the U.S. are pro-LGBTQ and so they are now choosing to leave in droves. Ironically, they are complaining about the rigorous hoops and hurdles in place to disaffiliate – hoops and hurdles that they introduced thinking it would be the progressives who would be leaving.
At any rate, Methodism in the U.S. experienced a divorce once before in our past. Upon the onset of the Civil War, the Methodists split in two. There was a Methodist Episcopal Church North, and a Methodist Episcopal Church South. In time, that war ended, with the side favoring justice (the end of slavery) winning out, and the two churches reunited creating The Methodist Church in 1939. I was born in 1968, the year the Methodist Church merged with the Evangelical United Brethren to form the United Methodist Church. Some contend that much of the current division in the UMC is due to a lack of full integration of those two churches, contending that UM congregations and persons who were formerly EUB being more theologically conservative. I don’t think that insight fully explains things, however, I do think that the current split that is happening will also be temporary.
I predict that within 30 years the GBM and the UMC will reunite – again favoring the side of inclusion and justice. The fact is, very few people under 40 years old are opposed to homosexuality. Homophobia has a shelf-life, and its days are numbered. 40% of Generation Z identify as LGBTQ along with 30% of Christian young people.
I just learned that a conservative UM layperson in Indiana has been giving a presentation at many of the UM congregations in that state. His talk included a powerpoint presentation and one of those slides (19 minute mark) featured words I wrote in a blog in 2018. They were pulled out of their context and provided no reference to the article – which provided a lot of nuance. Conservatives tend to not care for nuance. Sigh. He’s tragically unaware about the rich history of valid theological diversity within the Church re: christology, theories of the atonement, understanding of scripture, and more. (He’s also unaware that I ended my tenure as Director of the Wesley Foundation at C.U. Boulder in June 2019. He also misspelled my name.) Here’s a screenshot of that slide:
I noticed that exact same cherry-picked selection of my words was found in a letter sent out this past July as a dog-whistle to the conservatives to fire them up for their coordinated effort to spin the the reason for their mass disaffiliation. That same summer, the UM bishops in Africa saw that they were being manipulated by the American conservatives and broke ranks.
It appears that I’m now being made into a Poster Child of “all that is wrong with progressive Christianity” (specifically, with the progressive wing of the UMC) and that I’m being scapegoated as a bogeyman by conservatives in their effort to save face – by gaslighting themselves and others that the “real” reason they’re leaving is about theology – not their homophobia. They’re engaging in a coordinated “dramatic exit.”
I’ll close with the following essay (modified) I wrote for the Progressing Spirit newsletter stating things as they are – placing current events in a helpful historical context:
“The Jig is Up”
The 1960s and ’70s were a time of great social change in the United States. Racial segregation was officially ended. The Civil and Voting Rights Acts were passed. The two major political parties switched platforms and agendas. Women’s Liberation and Gay Pride were on the rise and a sexual revolution took place, culminating in “The Summer of Love.” In concert with all of this was a profound movement of young people challenging the status quo in many ways – including pushing back against the war in Vietnam. The voting age had been lowered to 18 and many bras and draft cards were being burned. And the US Supreme Court passed the Roe v. Wade ruling. In the eyes of some, the “American way of life” was under attack. What such people meant by this is that they feared that the era of privilege and power for straight, white, wealthy, capitalist men might soon pass unless it becomes vigorously defended.
In response, a cabal of far-right conservative politicians and conservative evangelical leaders conspired to bamboozle the masses into thinking that American Christianity needed a revival – and specifically, a revival to get as many Christians as possible to shift their understanding of Christianity such that it was reduced to mean embracing a specific culture that has strong stances controlling human behavior. It wasn’t about theology, it was about imposing specific values. The Moral Majority was formed in large part to trick Christians into thinking that embracing certain, so-called, “family values” is what it meant to be a Christian. Biblically speaking, they sought to get people to think that being anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-marijuana, and pro-capitalism, pro-gun, and pro-American empire is the “shibboleth” for authentic Christianity. It was a call for Christian nationalism. Instead of being a movement of the Holy Spirit it was a mass act of blasphemy, idolatry, and apostate backsliding. An excellent article in Politico Magazine supports my assertions and provides details.
Billy Graham warned, “It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.” Despite that warning, the Southern Baptist Convention was hijacked by fundamentalists in the early 1980s and that denomination became the largest Protestant denomination in the country. Many independent congregations also popped up in storefronts, and in time, as big box mega churches. What they frequently share in common is a wedding of the false gospel of wealth and prosperity and indoctrination into conservative “family values.” In tandem, the Republican party was rebranded – a la Ronald Reagan, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell – as being “God’s Own Party.” Tragically, to this day, many American Christians think that if you’re a Christian you must vote Republican.
Simultaneous to all of this was the creation of the Institute for Religion and Democracy (1981) – a conservative political think tank and political action organization. That organization, funded by far-right conservatives such as Adolph Coors, etc., seeks to undermine the remaining major Protestant denominations – which have tended to be centrist, if not liberal politically. Their mission is to cause conflict, strife, and confusion, divide and conquer, and thus render impotent the prophetic “speaking truth to power’ wings of those denominations. The Wesleyan Covenant Association is the tentacle of the IRD “Hydra” within the United Methodist Church – the denomination of which I am a member and serve as a pastor.
Followers of this newsletter are likely aware that the United Methodist Church hasn’t been ”united” in quite some time, and that the denomination is experiencing a split regarding the reality of homosexuality. A new splinter denomination has formed this past spring and it is likely that 10% or more of the UM congregations in the U.S. will defect to that conservative group which doesn’t embrace LGBTQ persons.
The new “Global Methodist Church” was intended to yoke the conservative (divided) Methodists in the U.S. with the majority of Methodists in Africa and South America. But reality hit. Leaders of the UM Church in Africa have balked and are indicating that they may not wish to split after all. They woke up and smelled the proverbial coffee. “African bishops claimed the Africa Initiative has ‘lost its original goal of helping The United Methodist Church in Africa’ and instead is ‘working with Wesleyan Covenant Association to destroy our United Methodist Church.”
And, just a few weeks later, a major study conducted by evangelical Christians in the U.S. came out indicating that 65% of American evangelicals reject original sin; 74% don’t believe the Bible should be read literally; 56% believe God accepts the worship of world religions; nearly half (48%) believe that God changes; and nearly half (43%) don’t think Jesus was “God.” [views shared with many progressive Christians] And yet over 90% have consensus that abortion is wrong and that sex outside of marriage between a man and a woman is wrong. Conservative evangelicalism in the U.S. is clearly far more about the social values of being opposed to certain behaviors than it is for “proper theology.”
Certain conservative leaders within the Divided Methodist Church have been claiming that they aren’t leaving because of views about homosexuality, but rather, that they’re leaving because ‘too many United Methodists hold unacceptable theological stances.’ Clearly, Conservative evangelical Christians in the U.S. have overplayed their hand. They have discovered that fewer United Methodists in the U.S. share their views and stances. No, what is true is that even evangelical Christians aren’t heeding to conservative notions of normative doctrine and orthodoxy. What is true is that evangelical Christianity in the U.S. is imploding and experiencing their own internal split. What is true is that it’s clear for all to see that the real reason that conservative UMs are leaving is because of bigotry, especially homophobia – and sex phobia in general.
“I’m reminded of the movie Footloose (1984) where young Kevin Bacon’s character challenges the strict religious values and traditions of a small town in Texas that has banned dancing. Which in turn reminds me of the joke, “Why are fundamentalists opposed to premarital sex? Because it might lead to dancing!” (excerpt from my forthcoming book, “Discovering Fire,” p. 18, Chapter 4)
What’s clear is that few people wish to be part of “churches” which seek to control, judge, and exclude people who they know Jesus loves and embraces. I’ll close with the words of the late poet Edwin Markham:
“He drew a circle that shut me out-
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle and took him In!”
and those of George Orwell, “They fear love because it creates a world they can’t control.”
XX ~ Roger
Rev. Roger Wolsey is a certified Spiritual Director, United Methodist pastor, and serves on the Board of Directors of ProgressiveChristianity.Org. He is a contributing writer for the Progressing Spirit newsletter, and author of Kissing Fish: christianity for people who don’t like christianity Click here for the Kissing Fish Facebook page . His new book, Discovering Fire, will be released in early 2023. 
Roger’s other blogs on Patheos
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