Today, Explained - Separation of church and church

Episode Date: May 13, 2024

Leaders of the United Methodist Church, one of the largest Christian denominations in the US, gathered in North Carolina to hash out a disagreement that’s dividing the church. Today, Explained’s Laura Bullard and church historian Ashley Boggan explain what the Methodist split tells us about America. This episode reported by Laura Bullard, produced by Amanda Lewellyn, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Amina Al-Sadi, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! vox.com/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Back in 2019, the Methodist Church met to vote on the inclusion of its LGBT members. The Methodists are thinking, we have gays. We have a gay issue. We have queer people who are trying to get ordained. We have clergy trying to perform same-sex marriages. The problem is none of this is technically allowed. The voting didn't go great. The LGBT observers were locked out of the room. And as the vote was happening, you could hear their fists pounding on the doors.

But that vote, which was to continue excluding gay members, only narrowly passed. And about 25 percent of the more conservative U.S. congregations saw the writing on the wall, and they left the denomination. Then earlier this month, the Methodists voted on this question again. And Today Explained was there for the debates, for the songs, for Methodist trivia night, and for the results. And we're going to tell you what went down coming up next. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM.

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NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or This is Today Explained. Laura, go ahead, give me your full name and tell me what you do. So 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. What are we talking about? 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. I am not personally in a faith community. And one of the reasons for this is I grew personally in a faith community. And one of the reasons for this is I grew up in a faith community that would not have affirmed my marriage. 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. 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. 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. 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. What did this look like as the members were deliberating? 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? 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, it's like a mullet, you know. Party in the front, business in the back. It's like I'm here to party.

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. You're still worried about it? So two, they love to break out in song.

Hallelujah! 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. 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. 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. We have a lot of voting. We were voting now to close the that's the intention. 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. So at the conference, it becomes pretty clear early on that the progressive basically have a super majority. They're getting everything that they want passed. At the close of deliberations, anywhere you walk is essentially a Methodist takeover. 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. And this is because I had actually walked in to a Methodist trivia night.

In 1735, John Wesley spent just over two years in what colony? This was not just a trivia night that Methodists attended. This was actually, this was Methodist trivia. Georgia! Good. 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. Do you regularly host church trivia?

No. No? Hmm. 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. What they're voting on is, is there going to be inclusion for avowed homosexuals? Where does this land? What is the final vote?

It was so subtle that I actually missed it at first. The affirmative hasn't and the motion is adopted. The consent calendar A05 is approved as printed. I didn't realize that it happened until I saw the guy from the Associated Press sprinting across the press room. 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 clergy members performing marriages for same-sex couples. 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. 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. And immediately, as soon as you walked out, it was an extremely Methodist moment.

They started to do what Methodists do. Let us rejoice. Let us rejoice! And be glad in it! And be glad in it! 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. 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. I was born in a United Methodist hospital, baptized in the United Methodist Church, and decided to be a pastor in the United Methodist Church when I was in fifth grade. What does it feel like to stay in it, through a coming out,

I mean, all the way up until this moment you know i feel like the church was coming home and the church embracing me and saying sorry but now i could tell a lot of closeted friends in the philippines my 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. 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. 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. Yeah, not everybody was thrilled. This represented a pretty major power shift in the church. I spoke with Dixie Brewster, and she is a conservative delegate from Kansas. 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. But after today and the votes, it obviously seems like there had a place at the table. 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. 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. 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, 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. 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. 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. 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. But Laura, what did you take away from this? What can't you stop thinking about? 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. And I want my kids and grandkids to be Christian, to be Christian and to follow Jesus and to believe that we can have salvation through

God's grace. And that's what's most important. How would you feel if those kids or grandkids ended up in this Methodist church? I would be very disappointed. OK. Just check in now. And mostly, I just keep thinking about how we both laughed when she said that last thing. And I keep asking myself, like, why was that funny?

Like, why was that funny to me? I feel like it's because for a second she was reaching for some kind of, like, higher level of grace or understanding. Like, okay, you might be this Methodist, Methodist this way or Methodist this 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. And then all of a sudden, like everything feels unfixable and absurd. And I think we both

looked at each other and we're like, yeah, things are bad. 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. And I just sort of think that like 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, today explained fact-checker and reporter and self-avowed practicing homosexual. Next up, we dig into how the Methodist church's fights mirror the country's, and we talk about what this vote might tell us about America's future. Thank you. help you save time and put money back in your pocket.

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Terms and conditions apply. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. If you're a finance manager, you're probably used to having to toggle between multiple disjointed tools just to keep track of everything. And sometimes that means there's limited visibility on business spend. I don't know what any of that means, but Ramp might be able to help. Ramp is a corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your back pocket. Ramp's accounting software automatically collects receipts, categorizes your expenses in real time.

You can say goodbye to manual expense reports. You will never have to chase down a receipt again. You can customize spending limits and restrictions so your employees are empowered to purchase what your business needs. And you can have peace of mind. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained. Cards are issued by Sutton Bank, a member of the FDIC, and terms and conditions do apply. 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.

Metho-nerd Ashley has a theory about the Methodist church. As go the Methodists, so goes America. So if the Methodists are fighting over something, the rest of the country probably is too. 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. We were founded at the same time, within kind of a decade of each other. 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. 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.

Before it came to an America that would be ripe for division. John Wesley, our founder, really encouraged persons to challenge social norms. 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. 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. And we see a lot of the same happen in the United States. 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. 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. Later on, by the 1870s, Methodists are figuring out whether or not women can be seated as delegates at general conference. 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. 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. And that is also when the Methodist Church grants full ordination rights to women in 1956. 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. 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. In the 1980s, did the Methodists get worked up about capitalism? Methodists have kind of always been worked up about capitalism. John Wesley encouraged people to, like, not own anything, to save all you can and give all you can.

And he allegedly never kept a dollar to his name, but nobody would have ever thought of him as an impoverished person. Hey, let me ask you something. John Wesley urged people to not own anything. I would assume that means people? During the time of the slave trade, were the Methodists sort of fighting openly about, you know, about this great American evil? Yes. So, during John Wesley's time, John Wesley is kind of one of the few British clergypersons to openly critique slavery. And one of the ways that he does this is he writes three general rules, is what they're called. Those three general rules are do no harm, do good, attend to the ordinances of God. And under each of those rather vague rules, he gives specific examples of how you

do each of those things. Under do no harm, slavery was listed as an extreme way of people doing harm. And then finally, before he dies, his last written letter is to William Wilberforce, who's a very famous British abolitionist. And he asks William Wilberforce, who was also a Methodist, to carry on the Methodist witness against slavery. So at the height of the Atlantic slave trade, John Wesley was all about pushing the boundaries of religion and society to include everybody. Ultimately, disagreements about slavery led to a big split in the Methodist Church in 1844, and the Civil War started 17 years later. Should we look at what's happening today in the Methodist Church as another one of those big schisms? Yes and no.

You know, right now, the United Methodist Church within the United States, we lost about 25% of our congregations. Wow. You know, coming out of General Conference, I see that the United Methodist Church did something it's never done before. 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. 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. And I think, you know, hopefully, the United States might be able to do something similar in order to do that. It'll require deep vulnerability with one another. It'll require looking past and maybe even listening beyond or around certain loud, powerful voices. And the United Methodist Church has finally done that. And it's a joyous day in the UMC. 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. I hear you, Ashley, and I love your optimism. I really do. But I am thinking back to the first half of the show when we heard a member of the congregation express her very real disappointment, her sense that the Methodist church was no longer for her. And in fact, she feared it was no longer for her children or her grandchildren. 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. 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. We can't lose 25% of Americans, you know, but we can alienate 25 percent of our neighbors. We can make them feel like they don't belong in this country, that this country is for our kind of people now. When you think about that, does that dull your optimism at all? Does that make you fear at all? What I would say is there's a little bit of a difference between being in practice and being on paper. 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. 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. Now that it's no longer in paper, we can do the work of living into it in practice. For the United States, what makes me nervous is our paper seems to get more and more restricting, right? I live in New Jersey. I, as a woman of reproductive age, I have full autonomy over my body in New Jersey. My sister living in Arkansas does not. I'm not saying that in order to move on as the United States,

we need to lose 25% of our people. I think that in order to move on as the United States, we need to lose 25% of our people. 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. And that is what the United Methodist Church has finally done. And people are free to agree or disagree with that, but that has to be a lived, embodied practice. Dr. Ashley Bogan of the United Methodist Church. Today's episode was produced by Amanda Llewellyn and reported by Laura Bullard. It was edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Amina El-Sadi, and engineered by Patrick Boyd.

I'm Noelle King. This is the day that the Lord hath made explained. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.