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--:-- Noel King: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Noel King. Today we're talking about the United Methodist Church, one of the largest Christian denominations in the US. Laura Bullard, our senior fact checker, is here to tell us about the church's recent split. Laura, go ahead, give me your full name and tell me what you do.
--:-- Laura Bullard: My full name is Laura Bullard, and I am senior fact checker here at Today Explained. So today you have migrated to behind the mic.
--:-- Noel King: What are we talking about?
--:-- Laura Bullard: Well, Noelle, this is a story that I find particularly interesting because I am a person who loves church. I love faith communities. I love people of faith, the shared language, the rituals. I just like generally think it's a really beautiful thing to organize a life around.
--:-- Noel King: And one of the reasons for this is you grew up in a faith community that would not have affirmed your marriage.
--:-- Laura Bullard: And this is because, and I don't know if I've told you this or not, but I'm actually, Noelle, I'm gay.
--:-- Noel King: Not you. So the UMC, the United Methodist Church, this is the largest mainline Protestant denomination in the United States. And they've been having a lot of conversations around this idea of inclusion. They're talking about whether or not to include gays basically what they call self-avowed practicing homosexuals so the story is something I've been paying attention to for a while.
--:-- Laura Bullard: And this year they're set to make like a lot of major decisions specifically involving these issues of inclusion. So basically I just told our boss that either y'all can send me to talk to the Methodists, or I'm going to need a week off for vacation because I'm planning on watching this go down one way or another.
--:-- Noel King: I will be going to the Methodist conference. All right. So the point of this conference is to have a debate over which direction the Methodist church is going to move in. More progressive, more conservative.
--:-- Laura Bullard: What did this look like as the members were deliberating?
--:-- Laura Bullard: Okay. So a few things to know. At this conference, I learned three things about the Methodists. One, they are nice. Shockingly nice. They were helping me fix my outfit. You call her in or out? Is it in or out?
--:-- Laura Bullard: This one's in, this one's out. Oh, no. I'm glad I asked you about my outfit. See, here's the thing. It's like a mullet, you know, party in the front, business in the back. It's like I'm here to party.
--:-- Laura Bullard: One woman gave me directions one morning, and these directions ended up being wrong. The next day, she found me and apologized. You walked in yesterday, and I sent you to the wrong desk to get your pass, and it's just been on my mind, so I apologize. Um, I'm still worried about it.
--:-- Laura Bullard: So two, they love to break out in song. I'm a loser. Amen. Amen.
--:-- Laura Bullard: And three, the actual process of General Conference, the way the votes happen, the way it looks, is methodical. Ah! Well done. You could probably also say it's tedious. It is really confusing. It's a little boring.
--:-- Laura Bullard: The basic idea is imagine you've got a thousand people in the same Google Doc. So we've got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Methodists, and they're sort of live editing their rules and stances in real time.
--:-- Laura Bullard: So we've got debates. We've got amendments. We've got debates about amendments. Does adding the word and rather than or make it so that marriage would be between a man, a woman, and also two other consenting adults? Because I don't think that's the intention.
--:-- Laura Bullard: We have a lot of voting. We were voting now to close the debate on the amendment, the amendment to the amendment, and the original motion.
--:-- Laura Bullard: So at the conference, it becomes pretty clear early on that the progressive basically have a supermajority. They're getting everything that they want passed. At the close of deliberations, anywhere you walk is essentially a Methodist takeover.
--:-- Laura Bullard: So my first night there, it's been exciting. I decided to go to a bar. They're having a trivia night. My thought is I'm going to get there and talk to some Methodist seminarians. It turns out that no one was available to talk because they were fully, fully locked in to what was happening.
--:-- Laura Bullard: And this is because I had actually walked in to a Methodist trivia night. At 1735, John Wesley spent just over two years in what colony?
--:-- Laura Bullard: Georgia! So I knew a big vote was supposed to happen the next morning. So I paid my tab and I conducted my only interview of the evening.
--:-- Laura Bullard: Do you regularly host church trivia? No. No?
--:-- Laura Bullard: So the next morning, things really kick off. We're eight years in the making, and the Methodists are set to make some pretty major decisions. And from what you've said so far, the progressive arm of the Methodist church is getting what it wants at this conference.
--:-- Laura Bullard: What they're voting on is, is there going to be inclusion for avowed homosexuals? Where does this land? What is the final vote?
--:-- Laura Bullard: It was so subtle that I actually missed it at first. The affirmative has it and the motion is adopted. The consent calendar A05 is approved as printed. I realized that it happened until I saw the guy from the Associated Press sprinting across the press room.
--:-- Laura Bullard: What had happened basically they'd removed this ban on the ordination of self-avowed practicing homosexuals as clergy members and they removed the ban on uh clergy members performing marriages for same-sex couples.
--:-- Laura Bullard: The whole room changed. People start audibly sobbing. They're out of their seats. They're walking around the rooms. Can we please hold? We did get chastened. Please hold our excitement as we continue to work together and do our work.
--:-- Laura Bullard: I noticed that people wearing, you know, rainbow stoles, rainbow patterned vestments were sort of filing out of the room. And so I followed them outside into the courtyard.
--:-- Laura Bullard: And immediately, as soon as you walked out, it was an extremely Methodist moment. They started to do what Methodists do. And be glad in it.
--:-- Laura Bullard: So people are overjoyed, overwhelmed, lots and lots and lots of tears. For a lot of folks out there, this is like the culmination of a lifetime of work.
--:-- Laura Bullard: One of those people is Reverend Dr. Israel Alvaran, and he's an elder and a clergy member from the Philippines. He is actually what they call a cradle Methodist.
--:-- Laura Bullard: I was born in a United Methodist hospital, baptized in a United Methodist church, and decided to be a pastor in the United Methodist Church when I was in fifth grade.
--:-- Laura Bullard: What does it feel like to stay in it through a coming out, I mean, all the way up until this moment, you know?
--:-- Laura Bullard: I feel like the church was coming home. And the church embracing me and saying, sorry.
--:-- Laura Bullard: But now I could tell a lot of closeted friends in the Philippines, my friends here and clergy who are queer who are still in the closet say we are being welcomed to this church we've always been part of it we're just reclaiming what we have already and being public about it.
--:-- Laura Bullard: That was one thing that I heard over and over just this idea that we've always been here we weren't planning on leaving and now we're allowed to be here.
--:-- Laura Bullard: It's this really beautiful moment and this really powerful moment, and yet I'm reminded that you told us this was a very divided conference.
--:-- Laura Bullard: Yeah, not everybody was thrilled. This represented a pretty major power shift in the church.
--:-- Laura Bullard: I spoke with Dixie Brewster, and she is a conservative delegate from Kansas.
--:-- Dixie Brewster: All along, I've really hoped for a big tent, United Methodist Church denomination, where the progressives, the centrists, and the conservatives all had a place at the table.
--:-- Dixie Brewster: But after today and the votes, it obviously seems like there's no place at the table for the conservative view of traditional marriage and family where a mother and father consist of the parents of a family and where those types of unions are celebrated.
--:-- Laura Bullard: So it's easy to imagine that this tent actually technically just got a lot bigger. But I did hear this from a lot of conservatives. We feel like this is no longer a big tent congregation. We no longer have a seat at the table.
--:-- Laura Bullard: And so where are they going to go? So we're not 100% sure yet. And it was hard to find people who were willing to tell me their next steps on the record.
--:-- Laura Bullard: But there is this new splinter congregation. It was founded when the churches first started disaffiliating in 2022, and it's called the Global Methodist Church.
--:-- Laura Bullard: In terms of doctrine, it looks a lot like the UMC, but they maintain pretty strict conservative opinions when it comes to issues of sexuality.
--:-- Laura Bullard: You, I will remind our listeners, you made threats to be able to go to this conference. You said, let me go or I'm going to take a vacation.
--:-- Laura Bullard: We're going to talk later in the show about how, in a very weird way, the Methodist Church represents America more than people might think. That's coming up.
--:-- Laura Bullard: But, Laura, what did you take away from this? What can't you stop thinking about?
--:-- Laura Bullard: So I've been home for a few days, and the thing I keep coming back to was this one moment that I had towards the end of my conversation actually with Dixie.
--:-- Laura Bullard: And I want my kids and grandkids to be Christian. Sure. To be Christian and to follow Jesus and to believe that we can have salvation through God's grace.
--:-- Laura Bullard: And that's what's most important. How would you feel if those kids or grandkids ended up in this Methodist church?
--:-- Laura Bullard: I would be very disappointed. Okay. Just checking.
--:-- Laura Bullard: And mostly I just keep thinking about how we both laughed when she said that last thing.
--:-- Laura Bullard: And I keep asking myself, like, why was that funny? Like, why was that funny to me?
--:-- Laura Bullard: I feel like it's because for a second she was reaching for some kind of, like, higher level of grace or understanding.
--:-- Laura Bullard: Like, okay, you might be this Methodist, Methodist this way or Methodist that way, but really, as long as we're all Christians, you know, and then we sort of snap back to like the political moment that we're in.
--:-- Laura Bullard: And then all of a sudden, like everything feels unfixable and absurd.
--:-- Laura Bullard: And I think we both look at each other and we're like, yeah, things are bad.
--:-- Laura Bullard: I don't know, I've been thinking about, like you said, throughout history, the way that the Methodist Church thinks about itself has sort of acted like is this really interesting mirror to the way America thinks about itself.
--:-- Laura Bullard: And I just sort of think that whenever this community gets to a place where they can no longer hold together as a community, that that's something that is worth paying attention to.
--:-- Laura Bullard: Laura Bullard, today explained, fact-checker and reporter and self-avowed practicing homosexual.
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--:-- Noel King: Next up, we dig into how the Methodist Church's fights mirror the countries, and we talk about what this vote might tell us about America's future.
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--:-- Noel King: I am Dr. Ashley Bogut. I am the General Secretary of the General Commission on Archives and History of the United Methodist Church, which I always like to say is kind of an annoyingly fancy way to say that I'm a giant Methodist history geek or a metho-nerd, as we prefer to be called.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: Metho-nerd Ashley has a theory about the Methodist church.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: As go the Methodists, so goes America. So if the Methodists are fighting over something, the rest of the country probably is too.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: There's a really great argument to be made that if you look at Methodist history within the United States, it's a great lens for looking at American history.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: We were founded at the same time within kind of a decade of each other, we grew dealing with a lot of the same quote-unquote issues, race and gender and sexuality, and trying to figure out how to grow and maintain influence and maintain relevancy within this growing and ever complex form of society that is the United States and that has been the United States.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: Ashley thinks the church's confrontational spirit, the thing that pushes its members to openly debate whether the U.S. is doing things right, goes all the way back to its beginnings in England.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: Before it came to an America that would be ripe for division. John Wesley, our founder, really encouraged persons to challenge social norms.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: You know, as a priest in the Church of England, he was both a representative of the church and the state. And so he's in this role and challenging both sources of his authority to be inclusive of more persons.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: When John Wesley is talking about the equality of all or seeking equity for all, no matter their race, gender, or their sexuality, those challenge the very heart of what it meant to be a full citizen in England.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: And we see a lot of the same happen in the United States.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: So, for example, in the early 19th century, Methodists are trying to figure out how and where and when to include Black Methodists in their worship services.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: And this is the same time that states within the United States are trying to figure out if slavery is going to extend further and further west or further and further south as the country expands.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: Later on, by the 1870s, Methodists are figuring out whether or not women can be seated as delegates at general conference.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: And this is right around the same time where we see the suffrage circuit arguing for women's rights to vote and have essentially a seat in American politics take place.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: Jumping forward even further, the 1950s, where women take on new roles, they begin to take over the workplaces in new ways, they have greater access to equal education, and all of these new opportunities are opened up to them.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: And that is also when the Methodist Church grants full ordination rights to women in 1956.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: And I would say in the 1960s and 1970s, when we start to see within United States politics, the emergence of the, quote, evangelical voting bloc, there also emerges within the Methodist Church and the United Methodist Church, this kind of evangelical voting bloc as well, that uses really similar rhetoric to push a more conservative understanding of gender and sexuality within the Methodist and the United Methodist Church that it's doing within kind of United States politics.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: So this is one of those consistencies that is always there between the Methodist tradition and the United States in terms of its political rhetoric
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: In the 1980s, did the Methodists get worked up about capitalism?
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: Methodists have kind of always been worked up about capitalism. John Wesley encouraged people to not own anything, to save all you can and give all you can.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: And he allegedly never kept a dollar to his name, but nobody would have ever thought of him as an impoverished person.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: Hey, let me ask you something. John Wesley urged people to not own anything. I would assume that means people?
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: During the time of the slave trade, were the Methodists sort of fighting openly about, you know, about this great American evil?
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: Yes. Um, so during John Wesley's time, John Wesley is kind of one of the few British clergy persons to openly critique slavery.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: And one of the ways that he does this is he writes three general rules, is what they're called.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: Those three general rules are do no harm, do good, attend to the ordinances of God.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: And under each of those rather vague rules, he gives specific examples of how you do each of those things.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: Under do no harm, slavery was listed as an extreme way of people doing harm.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: And then finally, before he dies, his last written letter is to William Wilberforce, who's a very famous British abolitionist.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: And he asks William Wilberforce, who was also a Methodist, to carry on the Methodist witness against slavery.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: So at the height of the Atlantic slave trade, John Wesley was all about pushing the boundaries of religion and society to include everybody.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: Ultimately, disagreements about slavery led to a big split in the Methodist Church in 1844, and the Civil War started 17 years later.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: Should we look at what's happening today in the Methodist Church as another one of those big schisms?
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: Yes and no. You know, right now, the United Methodist Church within the United States, we lost about 25% of our congregations.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: You know, coming out of General Conference, I see that the United Methodist Church did something it's never done before.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: We have never voted to constitutionally amend our structure. It has to be ratified still. But we've never done that without some sort of merger causing that.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: And so right now, the United Methodist Church is taking a firm stance on its identity and seeking to reclaim and reshape its identity in 2024. for.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: And I think, you know, hopefully the United States might be able to do something similar in order to do that.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: It'll require deep vulnerability with one another. It'll require looking past and maybe even listening beyond or around certain loud, powerful voices.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: And the United Methodist Church has finally done that. And it's a joyous day in the UMC.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: It could be a joyous day in the United States. But, you know, I take this as a mirror for maybe the United States to look at and say, well, the United Methodists did it. Maybe we could do it too.
--:-- Noel King: I hear you, Ashley, and I love your optimism.
--:-- Noel King: I really do. But I am thinking back to the first half of the show when we heard, you know, a member of the congregation express her very real disappointment, her sense that the Methodist Church was no longer for her.
--:-- Noel King: And in fact, she feared it was no longer for her children or her grandchildren.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: The Methodist Church in this moment did move forward, but it moved forward by shedding, as you said, about a quarter, a quarter of what it had.
--:-- Noel King: This is the thing we've been batting around all along, is that the United States tends to—the battles tend to be mappable onto each other.
--:-- Noel King: We can't lose 25 percent of Americans, you know, but we can alienate 25 percent of our neighbors.
--:-- Noel King: We can make them feel like they don't belong in this country, that this country is for our kind of people now.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: When you think about that, does that dull your optimism at all? Does that make you fear at all?
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: What I would say is there's a little bit of a difference between being in practice and being on paper.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: I'm going to say it that way. Right now, kind of the big change that we see within the United Methodist Church is that for the first time since our founding in 1784, on paper, we are not excluding anybody.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: We are finally not limiting the rights of Black persons or persons of color, of women, or of LGBTQ persons at any level of the church.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: Now that it's no longer in paper, we can do the work of living into it in practice.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: For the United States, what makes me nervous is our paper seems to get more and more restricting, right?
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: I live in New Jersey. I, as a woman of reproductive age, I have full autonomy over my body in New Jersey.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: My sister living in Arkansas does not.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: I'm not saying that in order to move on as the United States, we need to lose 25% of our people.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: I think that in order to move on as the United States, we need to stop limiting persons' rights and access on paper and allow them to agree or disagree, but stop restricting people's abilities and rights on paper.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: And that is what the United Methodist Church has finally done.
--:-- Dr. Ashley Bogut: And people are free to agree or disagree with that, but that has to be a lived, embodied practice.
--:-- Noel King: Dr. Ashley Bogan of the United Methodist Church.
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--:-- Noel King: Today's episode was produced by Amanda Llewellyn and reported by Laura Bullard.
--:-- Noel King: It was edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Amina El-Sadi, and engineered by Patrick Boyd.
--:-- Noel King: I'm Noelle King. This is the day that the Lord hath made, explained.
--:-- Noel King: Thank you.
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