Pulpit and Politics: Clergy in American Politics at the Advent of the Millennium

7. United Methodist Church

The United Methodist Church (UMC) is the largest mainline Protestant denomination and the third largest religious body in the United States. Of some two dozen churches within the MethodistPietist denominational family, it has the greatest number of members. All these churches originated in the Methodist revival begun by John Wesley in 1729, which found its fullest development in the United States, where Methodist congregations began to flourish at about the time of the American Revolution. Since that time, American Methodism has been transformed from a religious movement into a number of different institutional churches. Based on its history, size, diversity, and geographic dispersion, the UMC comes close to the status of a “national church” in the American religious landscape (Mead 1990c, 154). Unlike members of other religious movements in American Protestantism , Methodists have never been adverse to engagement in civic and political affairs. This openness to civic engagement stems from Methodist belief and practice and results in all the major political divisions in the country often being found within the UMC. Dubbed the church of the “golden mean” and the “large standard deviation,” Methodists are found across the entire political spectrum (Green and Chapter 7 United Methodist Church John C. Green 83 Guth 1998), as illustrated by two of the UMC’s most prominent daughters : U.S. senators Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) and Elizabeth Hanford Dole (R-NC), the spouses of the 1996 Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, respectively. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND The United Methodist Church was founded in 1968 with the merger of two denominations, the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren. In turn, each of these bodies was the product of earlier mergers .19 The Methodist Church was created in 1939 when the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Methodist Episcopal Church-South, and the Methodist Protestant Church became one denomination. The Evangelical United Brethren dated to 1946, when the Evangelical Church merged with the United Brethren in Christ. However, numerous other denominations in the Methodist family still remain separate, including the black Methodist churches (such as the African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal Zion, and Christian Methodist Episcopal) and Holiness churches (such as the Wesleyan Church, the Free Methodists, and the Salvation Army). Methodism began in 1729 at Oxford University in Great Britain, where John Wesley, his brother Charles, and other students belonged to a group called the Holy Club, dedicated to rigorous religious observance . From this personal discipline came the term “methodist,” originally a term of derision. Armed with “methods” of personal discipline and a commitment to holiness, the members of the Holy Club set out to evangelize the masses in Great Britain. A series of private experiences molded Wesley’s approach to this task, including service as a missionary in colonial Georgia in 1736 and his famous “heart warming” conversion experience on Aldersgate Street in 1738. Shortly thereafter, Wesley and his associates launched a series of dramatic revivals to, in his words, “reform the nation and especially the church, and spread Scriptural holiness over the land” (UMC 2002d). Wesley’s intention was to reform the Church of England, not found a new church (Heitzenrater 1995), but the revivals quickly developed their own specialized structure and methodology: outdoor preaching, itinerant ministers, classes and bands, lay leaders, and annual conferences . The revival movement soon spread beyond Great Britain to Ireland and the British colonies in North America. This success led 84 United Methodist Church Wesley to sanction new organizational departures. For example, after the American Revolution, Wesley appointed Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury as “superintendents” of the American Methodists. They organized the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1784 and adopted the title of “bishop.” In short order, a new American denomination was born, independent of both England and the Church of England. Methodism was successful in America because its beliefs and practices were well suited to the diverse and rapidly growing nation. It offered converts a “breathtaking message of individual freedom, autonomy, responsibility and achievement” (Hatch 1989, 177), and the Methodist circuit riders spread that message across the country during the Second Great Awakening in the first part of the nineteenth century. As a result, the Methodist Episcopal Church grew rapidly, and other Methodist denominations also developed. For example, in the early nineteenth century Jacob Albright, William Otterbein, and Martin Boehm organized churches among German immigrants based on Methodist principles that would eventually become part of the UMC. Black Methodists formed their own independent churches during this...